


Wheelchair Detective

by pixymisa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-11 00:18:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixymisa/pseuds/pixymisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The job wasn't finished, but Dean had other things on his mind. Like a moody little brother, and physical therapy, and being in a nursing home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wheelchair Detective

_“I want to show you.”_

_Those words were not normal for the old man. He was the quiet sort, the type to follow the staff around and try to help out, like a little kid. Normally, he wore a pleasant expression, a good-natured smile, and he would greet the staff and other patients with a simple, “Hey.”_

_He didn’t even look like the same man, the aide thought to herself, all worried and determined at once. It was puzzling enough on its own, but she had long since learned to investigate when things didn’t seem quite right._

_“Show me what?” she asked, and reached out to take his hand._

_He took it with great force, pulling her down the hallway, past his room. That, too, was unlike him. While she knew that he could be combative at times, like all of the patients on her hall, she rarely saw him like that. For him to be using any kind of force at all..._

_“Over here,” he said, and pointed to one of the rooms. “There they are. Right there.” He pulled on her hand again, pulling her toward the doorway._

_“What is it?” the aide asked, attempting to disengage her hand from his grip._

_He dragged her closer, then reached through the doorway to flip on the bright overhead lights. As soon as the room was lit up, he jerked away, obviously not keen on going in there. In the room were two beds, both occupied with sleeping bodies. The aide knew them both, and knew that the light would rouse and disturb them._

_“They’re sleeping,” she reassured the old man, and turned the light off. “Don’t you want to sleep?”_

_“Not sleeping!”_

_She was taken aback by his volume. Something had riled the old man up, and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Tell me, then.”_

_“Not sleeping,” he repeated. “They’ve got a week. All of those men are dead. They’ve only got a week.”_

_The aide put her arm across his shoulders, pulling him close. “It’s okay. We’ll keep an eye on them. They’ll be fine.”_

_He nodded, his eyes fixed on the darkened room. “Oh, okay. That’s good.”_

_But he didn’t move._

_The aide turned away from the room, hoping that they hadn’t woken up the two men sleeping in it. “Are you going back to bed?” she asked, and tugged him back down the hall._

_The old man looked a little puzzled. “Hey?”_

_“Come on, it’s the middle of the night. Let’s go.”_

_By the time she had led him to his room again, he was back to his normal self. Well, as normal as the disease would allow him to be. He allowed himself to be taken to the toilet, took off his slippers when instructed, and was tucked into bed in only a few moments. All was well, and all was calm._

_But the aide couldn’t forget what he’d said._

***

“I told you,” Sam said quietly, his tone sounding very reasonable, “there was no way to know the entire graveyard was haunted. So you can stop sulking.”

“I’m not sulking. I’m waiting for my pain pills.” 

“You just had Vicodin at the hospital.”

Dean glared at Sam. There was no reason why a younger brother should take that kind of tone with his awesome older brother. The awesome older brother who had, as a matter of fact, saved him from suffering, well, Dean’s fate exactly.

“What?” Sam stared at Dean for a long moment, then rolled his eyes. “Look, it’s two weeks. That’s it.”

Two weeks. On a shitty mattress that felt like it had a hole under his ass, sharing a room with a old man who smelled of boiled cabbage and urine, with random strangers who wandered in and demanded to see his equipment when they weren’t exactly hot.

“I’m in a nursing home,” Dean pointed out. “It’s like two weeks in Hell.” He sat back in his bed, shifting around in that stupid hole, trying to find a position that wouldn’t hurt. “And I think there’s something wrong with this mattress.”

“You’re fussing.”

Dean shot another glare at his brother. “No, I’m in pain, and you’re adding to it.”

Sam shook his head. There was a chair next to Dean’s bed, and he sat down in it. Dean was relieved, for two reasons. One, it meant that Sam had relaxed enough to stop hovering over him, and two, it meant that Dean wasn’t getting neck-strain from staring up at the giant mutant he had for a little brother.

“Fine,” Sam muttered, finally losing that worried look he had on his face, the one he’d worn since Dean had woken up the previous day. He shot a look over at the cabbage man, and continued in a low tone, “Next time, you get to read the Latin, and I’ll do the stupid macho stuff.”

“Nah, your Latin’s better than mine.”

“Mr. Applebaum? Am I interrupting something?”

Dean turned to see a nurse enter the room, calling his thanks-to-Sam alias. Though he had to wonder about the name. When did Sam come up with it, two seconds after he’d been asked for a name?

The nurse was of average height, was perhaps a little overweight, and had straight dark hair pulled back into a high ponytail. She also had a round, open face and bright eyes. He flashed her his best smile. “Nah, come on in. It’s Dean, by the way. And you look a whole lot better than that admissions nurse.” Who was a hag and a crone and was also, incidentally, a total bitch.

“Thank you,” she said, with a smile and a hint of a drawl. “My name is Debbie, and I’m going to be your nurse today. Now, I heard you got in a wreck.”

“More like the wreck ran into me,” Dean replied. He glanced over at Sam, who was watching her, eyes wary. “You’ll have to ask him what happened. Last thing I can remember was headlights.” Which was true. It was also true that there had been a ghost driving the car, and that it had been aiming for Sam.

Nurse Debbie looked over at Sam, a question on her face, and Sam answered her. “The guy slammed into him and kept going. It all happened so fast, I couldn’t get his plates. I’d like to press charges, but the police seemed less than positive about it.”

“Well, at least you have insurance,” she said.

That was a new piece of information for Dean. He looked over at Sam, raised an eyebrow, but Sam kept his attention on the nurse. “Yeah, isn’t that lucky. A few months ago, we didn’t.”

“You guys got good timing.”

“Look,” Sam interrupted, “I’m sorry to get into business, but when is his physical therapy going to start? We have two weeks, and I’d like to have him walking by then.”

She shrugged. “PT’s got to evaluate you first. Once they do that, you’ll get a wheelchair and a therapy schedule.”

“We have to wait for a wheelchair?”

Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Sammy, chill out. I just got here.”

“Dean...”

“Stop hovering, man!” he snapped. “Can’t you find a library or something to occupy your time?”

And there, that did it. Sam got to his feet again and started looming. No one loomed better than Sam, and not just because of the whole giant mutant genes. He even had on the frowny face, the one that had made Dean laugh when they were little. It wasn’t quite so cute now that he was grown up, and especially not while he was being an emo bitch.

Nurse Debbie cleared her throat and moved for the door. “You in any pain?” she asked of Dean. “I think I’ll go and see what kind of pain meds you can have.”

Annoyed, Dean sighed a deep sigh, the kind that bordered on teenaged girl. “Look, now. You scared the nice nurse away.”

“Quit your bitching,” Sam returned. “She’s bringing your happy pills.”

Dean lay back against his pillows and closed his eyes for a bit. Another argument. Ever since he had woken up, all Sam wanted to do was hover and yell at him. He wasn’t sure why his brother was so pissed off anyway. It was a glancing blow, really, and the car could have killed Sam. A fractured pelvis was nothing compared to, you know, that whole death thing.

Sure, surgery sucked. A lot. And he was bruised to all hell. But that was what the happy pills were for, right?

“I’m fine,” he said, lifting his head to look up at his brother. “Really.”

Sam rocked on his feet, all full of tension and concern and the sort of thing that pissed him the hell off. He wasn’t an invalid. It wasn’t even like the rawhead incident. Bones fucking healed.

“I’m _fine_.”

At that, Sam seemed to finally have enough. “All right. You’re fine. Whatever.” He huffed once, then walked out the door. Dean could picture him walking, shoulders hunched, mouth pinched, all the way to the entrance.

Dean lay back again. The pillows were crap, too, he decided. The mattress and the pillows and everything was all a bunch of crap. Especially the roommate.

God, he hurt.

Sammy.

He was sure that he had been pissy enough to run Sam off for at least a few hours. Long enough to think. More importantly, long enough for Sam to cool off.

Sam was strung tight, and there sure as hell had better be a reason beyond some brotherly concern for that. Dean noticed that the stupid graveyard was a little bit of a touchy subject. But Dean was going to be fine, so it didn’t matter. Sam was just sensitive. He’d always been a little too sensitive, but that’s why Dean was the older brother. The boy needed time to himself, but would never get it unless his hand was forced.

There was a light tapping noise from the direction of the door, and Nurse Debbie stood in the doorway, a little plastic cup in her hands. Her eyes wandered to the chair, to the lack of Sam, and she raised her eyebrows. “Your friend left.”

Dean shook his head. “He’s been with me since the accident. I don’t know if he slept or not.” It bothered him that he couldn’t tell, that Sam was keeping something like that from him. He pushed the thought away, grinned at her instead. “Looks like you got some of the good stuff.”

“Oxycontin, five milligrams,” she responded. “I brought it a little early. PT’s going to be down in a few. I thought you might like it before they start roughing you up.”

Awesome. While he didn’t think it would be all sunshine and daisies getting evaluated, at least he would get the wheelchair. At least then he could use the toilet unassisted. Peeing in a little plastic bottle was not high on his list of fun activities, though it was direct improvement from the catheter. Dean took the offered pill and tossed it back with some lukewarm water. “Thanks, I’m looking forward to it.”

His bed was by the door, the other side of the room partially blocked by light orange curtains. The cabbage man had pulled it, right after Sam and Dean and the EMTs had arrived. Dean figured the guy liked his privacy, too. Just beyond the edge of the material, he could catch a glimpse of sunlight and greenery. Only a glimpse. Other than that, he was cut off from the outside, his world narrowed down to a six-by-eight-foot rectangle.

Shit, it was going to be rough. His best bet would be to blast through the therapy as fast as he could, hope that he got better just as fast, and then leave AMA in about a week.

Of course, Sam might have other ideas, but Dean was older and therefore right.

Nurse Debbie moved to the other side of the room, over to the cabbage man, and pulled the curtain the last little bit to fully block the window. Her voice carried, though, and so Dean got to eavesdrop on a conversation involving more bodily fluids than he cared to think about.

He was really looking forward to that wheelchair.

***

His nurse’s aide was a black man named Alexander, and he was almost as tall as Sam and twice as wide. He was the one who brought Dean back from the therapy gym, and he was the one who really tried to get Dean to talk.

“I think you’re the youngest guy we got in here,” he rumbled from behind Dean’s shoulder. Dean had to really struggle not to turn in his chair and find something to assault the guy with, because having anyone other than Sam behind him like that drew his hackles up.

“Yeah, man,” Dean answered. “I think I am.” Dean tried not to tell the guy that it was his pelvis and not his arms that were broken, that he could find and wheel his own way back to his room, but the truth of the matter was that he was tired. The Oxycontin hadn’t killed all of his pain, and the strengthening exercises left him with an ache he couldn’t ignore.

“Your buddy’s back,” Alexander continued. “He showed up not that long ago, demanded to know where you were and all.”

Dean could picture him then, drawn up to his full enormous height, abusing the staff while simultaneously looking lost and alone. “He didn’t threaten you guys, did he?”

“Naw,” Alexander replied. “He calmed down when we told him you were in therapy. Besides, I could take his skinny ass down.”

Dean laughed, and was debating whether or not he should tell the guy he’d bet on Sam, any day of the week, when he got back to the room. Sam was looming again, but he looked down at the floor like a guilty puppy when he saw Dean.

“You need anything else?” Alexander asked.

“No, man. I’m good,” Dean said.

The guy looked back and forth between the two of them, just long enough for Dean to figure out what he was thinking, and then added, “Dinner will be by in about an hour.” Then he was gone.

The cabbage man was gone, too, and the curtain was pulled back all the way. It was about as private as it was going to be.

“Insurance fraud,” Dean murmured. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Sam dragged his gaze up from the floor. “Yeah, well. I didn’t have much of a choice. You were out cold. Had to improvise.”

“You couldn’t swing for a private room?”

“That would have been a little obvious. We needed to be under the radar long enough for you to heal.”

Dean nodded his approval, then jerked his head to the door. “You used different last names for us, didn’t you? I think they think we’re a couple.”

The corners of Sam’s mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. “It’s not the first time.”

“You going to talk to me?” Dean asked, getting to the meat of the topic. “Tell me why you have this bug up your ass?” He was too tired to deal with the bullshit they were throwing back and forth. It wasn’t what Sam wanted to talk to him about. There was guilt set in his shoulders, that was clear, and Dean hoped to hell it was guilt about something other than his hospitalization. That was Dean’s own fault, not Sammy’s.

Sam’s eyes fell on the door. “Yeah. It’s that stupid graveyard, Dean.”

The job wasn’t finished, he could see it in his eyes. And somehow, that was better, easier than anything else. Still a shitty situation by any means, but manageable. “I thought you said the incantation would work.”

“I thought it would.” He sighed, ran a giant hand through his hair. “It seems to have helped, though. I mean, no one else has been killed. Hopefully, it’ll stay like that long enough for me to dig the entire place up.”

Ouch. Salt and burn an entire graveyard? Without help? Without backup? Dean felt his mouth tighten up. “I don’t like it, Sammy.”

Sam shrugged, but there was something hard about it, like he was considering something he didn’t really like. Again, Dean had the feeling that he was hiding something. “I’ll dig it during the day,” Sam said. “There’s police tape up everywhere. I don’t think anyone will go exploring.” He shrugged again, and met Dean’s eyes with his own. “Besides, I have two weeks.”

Dean sighed, but there was nothing he could do to help. What was he going to do, jump the fence in a wheelchair? “I still don’t like it.” But he nodded to the window. “You’ve got a couple of hours of daylight left. You could probably get one done tonight.”

Sam nodded, and took one long stride to the door before stopping. He turned to Dean, his expression almost embarrassed. “Do you need help getting back into bed?”

Dean ran over his foot with the wheelchair.

With Sam gone, there wasn’t much to do. He would have liked to just get back in the bed and sleep, but moving from wheelchair to bed to wheelchair was a little too painful to manage more than he absolutely had to. Besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t slept in less comfortable places.

The TV hung on an arm that swung out from the wall. Dean investigated it, hoping for some HBO movie or maybe Oprah, but the damned thing only had fourteen channels. He turned it to the news, turned the volume down low so it was a steady murmur, and let his chin drop to his chest.

***

Dean liked the idea of going for a walk. Of course, the walking part wasn’t literal, but the idea stood. It was late, close to midnight, and on any regular day Dean would have been out drinking a beer and cruising for a little action – either a game of pool or a pair of nice legs, he wasn’t too particular. It felt strange to know that Sam was holed up in a motel instead of with him. On the other side of the room, the cabbage man let out a mighty snore, and it was too odd sleeping there next to someone he didn’t know, listening to breathing that didn’t belong to his brother.

Sam had arrived shortly after sundown, freshly showered and smelling of cheap motel shampoo. Under it all, Dean could still smell the smoke, the gasoline, and the raw odor of upturned graveyard soil, or maybe that was just his memory filling in the blank spots. He supposed that was what made him feel so restless, to the point where he called in the nurse aide for help getting back up into his chair.

Alexander was long gone, and so was Nurse Debbie. The nurse aide that helped him was short, but strong. Her nametag said that her name was Blair. She wasn’t even remotely his type, though her narrow face and slanting black eyes were pretty, but he smiled at her like she was. “Be gentle with me,” he told her. “Normally I like things a little rough, but I think I should take it easy for a bit.”

“You should stay in bed,” she told him. She didn’t rise to his flirting. Instead, she sounded concerned. And though he was bigger than she was, she pulled his ass out of bed and moved him over to the wheelchair like he was nothing.

“No, I’m a troublemaker. Can’t sit still for very long.”

“You’d better learn,” she warned him, and he suddenly had a mental image of her corralling a horde of unruly brats with just a few words. “We don’t have time to go chasing your butt all over.”

“I’ll be good,” he promised. She smiled then and rolled her eyes, and didn’t stop him when he made for the door. 

Dean rolled down the hallway, trying to ignore the persistent ache below his navel. He distracted himself for almost fifteen minutes looking over a map of the building. It was built out of two squares connected by an L-shaped hallway. It had three entrances, one of them for employees only, the other two for the front of each square. He found his room on the map, where it occupied the bottom rung of the second square, and he found that the sub-acute unit where he was staying only contained two hallways.

He started back down the hallway when the pain became a little harder to ignore. At first, he had an idea of trying to go back to bed, to sleep off the pain and hope that he would be able to do a little more exploring when he got up. But then he realized that he could hear his roommate snoring from out in the hallway, so he wheeled on right past his room, all the way up to the front where the nurses were sitting at the nursing station.

He recognized his night nurse, Cara, an older woman with dark red hair and a sharp tongue, but he had seen none of the others before. There were two of them, an older woman with blonde hair pulled back into a bun, and a largely pregnant lady with skin the color of one of Sam’s vanilla lattes. The pregnant lady, aside from being pregnant, was exactly his type, so when he was noticed, he put his smile on again.

“This one seems to be a real piece of work,” Nurse Cara told the others. “Dean Apple-butt, 511 door. I think I’ve seen him flirting with just about everyone.”

“Not true,” Dean protested, raising his hands in surrender. “I wasn’t flirting with my physical therapist.” 

Nurse Cara looked him over. “No, somehow I don’t think John’s your type. Too short.”

“Definitely not my type,” Dean assured her, though he didn’t think really hard about what prompted the ‘too short’ comment. He flashed another smile at the pregnant woman before returning his attention to Nurse Cara. “On the other hand, I do really like redheads...”

Nurse Cara snorted. “Yeah, whatever,” she said. “Why are you out of bed, anyway? You here for some drugs?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied, and put his hand on the bruises that covered his belly. “Son of a bitch hurts like hell.”

“You watch your language,” the blonde woman warned him. But, like the others, she was smiling.

Nurse Cara got to her feet, and made her way over to a large cart that he assumed housed all of the good stuff. She scribbled in a large binder, then bent and opened a drawer, popping a large white pill into a plastic cup.

The pregnant lady spoke up. “So, what happened to you?” she asked. “I heard you were in a car accident.” Her voice was soft and concerned, and right then Dean figured he could have bagged her if their circumstances had been a little different. Like her being pregnant, and probably dating the guy that made her pregnant, and her thinking he was gay and involved with a fifteen-foot freak of nature.

“Hit and run,” he replied, and then tossed back the pill and swallowed it dry. “We were just out walking, you know? And bam! Next thing I know I’m all busted up and they’re talking surgery. 

There was a small, polite cough to his left, and he turned to see a nurse aide. Like Cara, she also had red hair, but it was a lot browner, and she wore thick tortoiseshell glasses. She was also holding a tall cup in one hand.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, her eyes on Cara, “but isn’t Stacey working tonight?”

Nurse Cara shook her head. “No, I picked up for her.”

“Oh,” the girl said. She looked down at the white cup in her hand. “I made her tea.”

“How are you doing over there?” the blonde woman asked. “Things been good?”

The girl shrugged. “Could be better, could be worse. I just needed to get away from the motion alarms for a while. We’ve got half a dozen of them climbing out tonight.”

Nurse Cara snorted again. “See, that’s what you get for leaving us. Traitor.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Traitor?” he repeated.

Cara tossed a look his way and explained, “She used to work over here, until she decided that being kicked in the teeth by dementia patients is more fun.”

“It is,” was the casual protest.

“Really?” Dean asked, curious. “You like working with the crazy folks?”

She shot him a look then, the sort that Sam would give him when he was being obnoxious. “Just because they have dementia doesn’t mean they’re crazy.” She turned back to Cara. “Like, you know how we had those two guys die this week? Michael, in 703, said that they were going to die. It was weird. He was very intense when he said it. I think he knew about Mr. King’s death last week. Kind of funny that the two guys he said were going to die actually did.”

Cara frowned. “Funny,” she repeated. “So, you think you have a psychic over there or something?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “No, it’s just weird. And then tonight,” she added, her voice going quiet and intense, the kind of tone used for telling scary stories and urban legends, “he said that Grace had someone after her.”

“Yeah, her husband.” Cara’s tone left no argument as to the sexual nature of her comment. It was obvious she wasn’t falling for the creepy story. “Here, I’ll take the tea, before you talk my damn ear off.”

The girl handed over the cup with a smile. “You’re just as bad as I am, and you know it.” She looked down at her watch. “I should get going, anyway. I left Celia to deal with the unruly masses.” She quickly disappeared around the corner.

Dean found that his mouth was dry, and it wasn’t just from taking the pill. He’d lived through enough odd happenings and strange occurrences to recognize the signs of a hunt. “You guys have weird stuff happen a lot over here?” He made himself sound cool and detached, like he was a regular person asking a regular question.

Cara snorted, then took a sip of the tea. “All the time.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, a lot of places like these have strange stuff going on. And I’ve never seen a nursing home that didn’t have its ghosts. Not,” she added, “that we’re haunted or anything.”

“No,” Dean said. “Of course not.”

Which, he was pretty sure, was a damned lie.

***

Dean liked to think of himself as the more practical of the two Winchester brothers. Really. So, as much as he wanted to go and take a walk-through looking for the vengeful spirit or whatever, he knew that he couldn’t. Not in the middle of the night, with no Sam to back him up, and especially not once he realized that his wheelchair had a squeak. Stupid chair. It was way not stealthy.

“You going to stay up all night?” Nurse Cara asked him, and Dean looked from her to the other two nurses. They weren’t exactly paying attention to him, but it was obvious that they weren’t all that used to having a patient hanging around. Something about the silences. Like they had more they wanted to say, but couldn’t.

“Nah,” Dean replied. “Just came for my fix.” He shifted in the chair, hissing a little as a stab of pain went through him. He hoped the Oxycontin would kick in fast. He’d been through worse, but the situation made it more frustrating. At least Sam wasn’t there. His brother would have lectured him about the dangers of overdoing it in therapy, and about not staying in bed, and it would have pissed him off.

Stupid graveyard. Stupid ghosts. If they had just acted like normal vengeful spirits, then he wouldn’t have been in his situation at all. They could have just moved on to the next town, the next job. Been done with it all. But when were things ever simple in their line of work?

Never. That’s when.

Nurse Cara turned to the others and jerked her head in his direction. “Look at this guy. He doesn’t love me. He’s just using me to get to the drugs.” The blonde woman and the pregnant lady both laughed, little short laughs, quiet and practiced. He chuckled with them.

“I think I’ll go back to bed now,” he told Cara after the moment was done, and he flashed her his smile, the one that said “ _you could join me if you want_ ”. She snorted again and shook her head, but smiled like he was adorable. And he totally was.

Dean turned the chair around and wheeled back down the hallway. He missed his room on the way past, but decided to make it worth the trip. The map of the building wasn’t that far out of his way, and he was curious, repeating to himself the room number the dementia aide had mentioned. _703_. Two deaths, while not unusual in a nursing home, had happened close enough together and under strange enough circumstances that a civilian had noticed. He could hear Sam’s voice in his head, _Lore says that psychics and insanity are often connected_. Dementia wasn’t far from insanity as far as Dean was concerned. No matter what the red-haired aide had said.

“What are you doing?”

Dean turned to see his aide standing a few feet away. She had her hands on her hips, head tilted slightly to one side, the expression one would use when scolding a puppy. He turned back to the map. “Trying to make sense of this place,” he replied, tracing the square with his eyes until he found the room. 703 sat on the opposite side of the square from his own room, which would make sneaking over there pretty easy.

He hoped.

“You planning an escape?” Blair asked, and there was something a little hard under her light tone, something beyond a simple scolding.

“Why?” Dean asked, facing her and lifting one eyebrow. He kept his tone playful. No reason to rile her up. “Should I?”

She shook her head, that tension released, smile and humor back in place, and walked around him to grab at the handles of his chair. It still made his shoulders tense, but he forced himself to relax. “I told you we didn’t have time to go chasing your butt all over. You need to go to bed.”

“What’s with the obsession over my ass?” Dean wondered out loud. “I’ve been sitting on it the entire time. It’s not like you ladies can appreciate it like this.”

She laughed, the same short and quiet laugh that the nurses had used. He figured then that it was to keep from waking folks up in the middle of the night when faced with someone as entertaining and charming as himself. “Come on,” she said, and wheeled him back towards his room.

The cabbage man was still snoring, but it had lessened a little. The orange curtain had shifted positions, pushed back a good foot or so, and Dean assumed that the man had gotten up. Most likely, right after he had. Being shuttered away from someone so close still made him uneasy, but Dean knew that he wasn’t in any danger from a little old dude.

He still missed his knife, though.

Blair used the same move on him to get him onto the bed that she had used before, counting _one-two-three_ , and moving him with what seemed like no effort at all.

“You’re pretty strong,” he noted.

“You have to be, in this line of work.” She helped him get his feet up in the bed, then pulled the covers over him and reached for the chain to his overhead light. “Good night, sir.”

“Wait.”

She hesitated, her brows drawn together, and looked at him – really looked at him – for the first time. Dean got the feeling that she was the first person to pay attention to him as a person instead of a patient since he had been admitted. Her slanting eyes narrowed into slits. “What is it?”

He said the first words that came to mind. “Look, I’m not used to being alone like this. Can you just talk to me for a bit?”

Blair hesitated again, looked between him and the door. He put on his best Sam expression, the wide-eyed wounded puppy face, and her face melted ever so slightly. “Okay,” she said, and even though her tone was reluctant, Dean knew that he had her. “Just for a few minutes,” she warned. “It’s been a busy night.”

Sammy would have been so proud. “Can you tell me about this place?” he asked, all casual. Making conversation. Because he was lonely.

She shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

He had to fight to keep his face like that, to keep his expression at Sam-levels of earnest when faced with such an open invitation.

“Everything,” he told her.

***

He was woken up too early in the morning. “Alexander, you’re killing me,” he groaned, but that didn’t stop the man from taking his vitals signs.

“Come on, man,” Alexander said, no apology in his voice as he hooked Dean up to various instruments. Blood pressure cuff on his arm, a clip on the end of his finger, thermometer stuck under his tongue. “I saved you for last. Even Mr. Andropoulos is up,” he added, with a jerk of his head in the cabbage man’s direction, “and that man likes his sleep.”

Dean looked over to where his roommate was sitting, curtain pulled back all the way, reading the local newspaper.

“I want you to know that you’re a cruel bastard,” he said, as soon as the thermometer was gone.

“That’s why I went into nursing in the first place. That caring for people thing is just a load of bull.”

Dean actually laughed. It was weak, and it cut off partway as he turned in the bed to sit up and a sharp pain hit him a hand-span from his hip, but it was real.

Alexander raised his eyebrows, but otherwise didn’t react to his pain. It was only after Dean was dressed, in baggy jeans and some flannel, and in his wheelchair again that he seemed to remember that Dean was hurt. “You want a pain pill?”

“Please,” Dean groaned.

Alexander nodded, headed for the door and slid past Sam.

Having Sam there was a relief. Dean felt his shoulders loosen up, his face relax into his normal expression.

“Hey, Sam.”

His brother, on the other hand, looked tense. “How’d you sleep?”

Dean shrugged. “Not the best I’ve ever had. Seriously, there’s a hole in that mattress. Right under my ass.” He waited for Sam to accuse him of fussing again, and when that didn’t happen, he continued, hoping that the old man was hard of hearing, “And my roomie, well. I’ve heard wood chippers that are more quiet than he is.”

“In other words, you’re fine.”

Dean shrugged. He wanted to tell Sam about what he had heard the night before, but Mr. Andropoulos was still sitting there. Besides, he was pretty sure he knew how his brother was going to react. Another hunt, when the previous one wasn’t even over yet? Sam would worry. Sam would brood and hover, and it would piss Dean off. Again. Fucking rawhead, for giving Sam the knowledge that Dean wasn’t the invincible older brother he had always pretended to be.

So instead, Dean smiled like he was the most bored person on the face of the planet – and he was – and said, “Hey, lend me your laptop.”

“What? No.”

“C’mon, Sammy, why not?”

Sam’s brows wrinkled up. It wasn’t his frowny face, and it wasn’t his bitch face either, but something in between, threads of exasperation running through it. “Because I don’t trust you with it, that’s why. Last time you used it, I found so much spyware that I had to change web browsers. Fortunately, you suck at clearing your history, so I knew exactly which site to block.”

Busty Asian Beauties dot com, his favorite. Sam was a cruel man, but Dean rolled his eyes. “I won’t look at porn, I promise.”

Sam reached for the television and pulled it down to Dean’s eye-level with an ominous creak. “Watch Oprah,” he said.

“That crap doesn’t get Oprah,” Dean said. “I asked, and you have to pay extra for cable.”

“We’ll pay,” Sam assured him, and Dean translated that to mean that the credit card companies were going to pay.

“And in the meantime?”

Sam was silent for a long while, the muscles in his jaw jumping with tension. And suddenly he knew that Sam had slept about as well as he had. Stupid fucking graveyard. It was behind it all, he knew it, and wished that he could let Sammy sleep through the day and dig up the decrepit thing himself. Digging during the day was definitely less dangerous, but there were still a number of angry spirits that wanted them both six feet under.

“Why don’t you stay with me?” It would be safe, better for Sam with the added benefit of entertaining Dean at the same time. Win-win.

“The job comes first,” Sam said, and it was creepy how much he sounded like Dad, there. But then he sighed, rubbing at his face, pushing his ridiculously messy hair out of his eyes. “I’ll stop by after lunch and drop the laptop off. No porn, and I’m holding you to that promise. Got it?”

Dean nodded and reached for the TV. Oprah or no Oprah, it was better than just staring at the wall. “Got it,” he returned. Sam nodded, turned on his heel to leave, and Dean called after him, “Sam?”

Sam didn’t turn to face him, he just stood there in the doorway. “What, Dean?”

“Be careful.” Dean wanted to say more, but Mr. Andropoulos was just sitting there, placid as fuck, so he couldn’t tell his brother to watch his back, even in the daylight. The ghosts were riled up enough. Now that someone was doing a salt-and-burn on them, they were going to be that much more riled up. And Sam, digging alone with no backup, with the possibility of the police coming back to investigate?

“I’m a big boy, Dean,” Sam said. He still hadn’t turned to face him, just hunched there in the doorway, voice low. “I can handle it.” He hesitated a moment longer, then shook his head and left.

Dean leaned back in his chair, shoved the TV aside. Yeah, something was definitely up with the kid. He was hiding something, and Dean wished to god he knew what it was. Sam was smart – scary smart, Dad always said – but Dean always thought that was part of his problem. He was too smart, and couldn’t make his brain shut up long enough to concentrate.

Or maybe it was the psychic crap, the stupid on again/off again ESP thing that didn’t seem to do anything but get them into more trouble. Whatever it was that was bothering Sam, Dean couldn’t do a damn thing about until his brother started talking to him again.

Alexander came in then, holding his breakfast tray in one hand. His eyes scanned the room, found Dean, and he slid the tray onto the bedside table. “Gone again,” he noted. Dean lifted the lid and took stock – scrambled eggs and cheese, bacon, some wheat toast, milk, and a box of cold cereal. Fruit Loops. Awesome. “Does he stay for very long?” Alexander asked, and it took Dean longer than it really should have to figure out who he was talking about.

“Sam? Yeah. He’s got work, though.” At Alexander’s expression, he continued, “He stayed with me the entire time I was at the hospital, and that was a full week. So cut him some slack.”

Alexander nodded. He looked a little unsure of something, but Dean couldn’t figure out what it was. He stepped out of the room again, and Dean noted that his roommate was looking at the doorway expectantly. Waiting for his own breakfast. After another few moments, Alexander returned, another tray in his hands. Mr. Andropoulos put his paper down and reached for it.

Dean laid into his eggs.

As the aide walked by his bed again, he paused, then turned to face Dean. “What does he do?”

“Private investigator,” Dean explained around a mouth full of food. He nodded in appreciation – the eggs were good – and swallowed. They were staying for at least another week. Better make it something close to the truth. He put on a smirk and said with perhaps a little less sincerity than he should have used, “He’s working on something very confidential. Could ruin a lot of folks around here.”

Alexander stared at him. “You are so full of it,” he said, and walked away.

***

His physical therapist wasn’t there, so he got someone else instead. Kathie, spelled with an I-E. She was tall, very thin, and had a long gray braid that hung down the middle of her back. She wasn’t as cheerful as John had been, but that man had seemed almost terminally possessed with a good mood.

Kathie set him up at one of the cross trainer machines, which looked like the unholy love-children of a ski machine and a recumbent bicycle. More strength training. And while it helped that Dean was in good shape before the accident, his patience was pretty shot with how tired he got, how quickly he lost his energy. But the only solution for that was to just work harder. It was the Winchester way, after all.

“So, what are you in for?”

Dean turned to his left and fumbled on the trainer as his concentration broke. The old woman, who sat at the next machine over, had her eyes fixed on him. She was old, but robust. Somehow he didn’t think that some asshole family member had shipped her off to the old-folks home in the middle on the night.

“Me?” he asked, when he realized he’d been quiet for a little too long.

“You,” she agreed, and then flashed him a 250 watt smile. If he’d been in a bar instead of a therapy gym, he would have guessed she was cruising him. “Places like these,” she explained, with a wave of her hand, “are like prison. It’s always the first question you ask. Bonus points for medical jargon.” She winked, then paused on her own machine long enough to point to her legs. “For example, these are bi-lateral total knee replacements. Hurts like a bitch, but I wanted them healed up before my cruise. Hot young men like yourself aren’t generally attracted to canes and walkers.” She leaned toward him, extending her hand. Dean took it. “I’m Karla, by the way. And you are...?”

“Dean,” he returned. “Uh, I’m not so hot with the jargon, but here goes. Surgical repair of pelvic fracture, post motor vehicle accident. Hit and run,” he clarified for her. “I was on foot.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. And then, he had a perfect opening for a little bit of research. His cover even fit. “Look, I’m not from around here. Was just passing through when some bad luck hit. Can you tell me about this place?” It was a similar line to the one he had used with Blair, but the old lady seemed to have a lot more time on her hands to talk than the aide had.

“You want general stuff?” she asked. “Or the gossip?”

“Give me the juicy stuff.”

She grinned. “You got it.” She looked up and over her shoulder, eyes searching, and she must have found what she was looking for, because when she returned her attention to Dean, her smile was even brighter. “This place has been around for several years,” she said. “Before that, there was this shelter, a farm, for battered women. There was a bit of a to-do about it all when the farm got sold and demolished, but the hospital needed somewhere to shunt off some of its patients. There are other nursing homes in the area,” she explained, “but this is the only one that takes on more of a combination of things. The sub-acute care, along with rehab and long-term care.”

“And dementia,” Dean said, thinking about the conversation from the previous night.

Karla nodded. “I’ve been in a few places before,” she told him, “but this place takes the cake.” She waved a hand around. “There’s always something going on, you know? Some drama. It’s better than a soap opera. You have your sex, your violence, everything that winds up on the news at three in the morning.”

And then, oh god, the examples she shared. By the time Kathie came to send Karla on her way, Dean knew all about two of the doctors who were married, but not to each other, screwing in the HR office after-hours, or the aide who was married to a tweaked-out meth-head, or the family member who had brought a gun in and threatened the nurses over some nausea medication.

His favorite, though, involved Alexander. “...As it turns out,” Karla told him, “she was married and had just had a baby, too. Then she finds out he’s been sticking it to another nurse. Not just her, either. Three of the nurse aides, too. And they _all knew about it_. She was the only one who thought she was the only one.”

“Alexander, you dog,” Dean laughed. He hadn’t realized that the man was such a player. But five women? All at the same time? It was awesome. Especially since he thought he also recognized the first nurse in the story, some tanned bottle-blonde with cheap extensions and a holier-than-thou demeanor. 

And then Kathie was back, and she helped Karla to her feet, shuttling the old woman away like she had been listening to their conversation. Which she might have, but still. But it wasn’t like he was really any closer to figuring out what had happened, either. Both Karla and Blair were civilians, and didn’t look into the dark and shadows for the monsters lurking there.

“Oh,” Karla said, and Dean’s head snapped up to look at her again. “I’m over in room 406. Stop by when you have a chance, and I’ll tell you about the dining room ghost.”

Kathie clucked her tongue, an impatient noise. “That story again?” she said, and her tone had gone from professionally friendly to cold and disgusted. “Seriously, we’re all adults, here. There’s no such thing as ghosts.” And she jerked Karla away.

“I’ll stop by,” Dean promised, calling after them, and he only realized that he had started to flirt back when Karla’s face lit up. He followed her with his eyes until she was gone, and then went back to his work on the cross trainer machine.

The dining room ghost. The way she had said it was similar to how the red-haired aide had talked about her dementia patient predicting deaths, the way weirded-out witnesses described their brush with the supernatural. The meter was high on his weird-shit radar – however, there still wasn’t anything to support the idea that there was a hunt there, right under his nose.

“You shouldn’t listen to her.”

Dean looked up and saw Kathie, the end of her braid flipped over her shoulder and twined around her fingers. It looked like a nervous gesture, but he couldn’t be certain. “She’s interesting,” he said in a neutral tone of voice. There was some conflict there, between those two women, and he didn’t have to be Sam to know to tread carefully.

Kathie dropped the braid, flipped it back over her shoulder with a toss of her head. “I’ve been in this business for a long time,” she explained. “Longer than you’ve been alive, as a matter of fact, and people like her are the bane of my existence. All these people, living so close together?” She shook her head. “I tell this to a lot of folks, see. Because people talk, and it makes my job harder when they talk about things that don’t exist.”

“So, you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, and neither should you. I deal in the reality of things, Mr. Applebaum, whether people like it or not. I deal in what a person can and cannot do. When stories about ghosts and miracles and strange things float around, it makes people act differently. Stupidly.” She pointed at him, low on his body, and he realized that she was indicating the fracture. “You’re going to walk again, like nothing ever happened. You don’t need to look beyond yourself or the therapy for that.”

“I know,” he replied, and tried not to let his confusion show. He had nearly died once, had come pretty damn close to it in fact, and was aware that his body had limits. It surprised him that she thought it was about that, like he’d had a brush with mortality and wasn’t going to be able to recover without some greater power to back him up.

Kathie jerked her thumb over he shoulder, in the direction she had taken Karla. “So, what was that all about, then?”

Dean shrugged, and then smiled at her, one of his strongest, the kind designed to make her falter and smile back. It had never failed him before, and it didn’t let him down then, either. “I like ghost stories.” He shrugged. “I’m a writer, so I’m interested in that sort of thing. Every place has a story to tell, right? Well, I tell those stories.”

She relaxed then, the smile on her face becoming a little more real. Yeah, he could have bagged her, too, but he wasn’t into older women. “Well, okay,” she said, even though her voice still sounded a little unsure, “so long as it doesn’t interfere with your therapy.”

“Trust me,” Dean told her, and it was the honest truth, “ _nothing_ is going to stop me from walking out of here as soon as I can.”

***

Dean was halfway through his lunch tray when Sam reappeared, his laptop tucked under one arm. It only took one look for Dean to realize that whatever was going on with his little brother was that much worse than it had been that morning, so he ignored the laptop when Sam tossed it on the foot of the bed.

“Here,” he said, his voice short. “No porn. You promised.”

“Sam, sit down.” And it had to be a sign of how bad things were that Sam obeyed him, even though his eyes were dark and burning.

“I have work to do.”

Dean examined him for a moment. Circles under his eyes? Check. Face pale? Check. Shaking hands? Oh god, Sam’s hands were shaking. “When was the last time you ate?” he demanded.

The hesitation was very short. If Dean didn’t know his baby brother so well, he never would have noticed. “Eight.”

“AM or PM?”

Sam’s shoulders slumped, and there Dean knew he had won that battle. “It was dark, so PM.”

“What day?”

And the little brat didn’t even hide how long he had to think about it. “Tuesday?” he guessed, and Dean saw red for an instant.

“Do you know what day it is today?”

“Not Wednesday?”

“Sam...” He shoved his tray toward his brother. He’d only made it partway through the sandwich and mashed potatoes, and hadn’t touched the green beans at all. “Eat this.”

“It’s yours,” Sam said, like that made a difference.

“ _Eat it_ ,” Dean growled.

Sam stared at it, pecking at the food and pushing it around, like Dean had seen him do all of those times right after Jessica’s death. Yes, something was up, and no, he wasn’t talking about it, and something had to give somewhere.

A dark shadow moved out of the corner of his eye, and Dean realized that Alexander had been standing there for most, if not all, of the exchange. “You have him well-trained,” he noted.

Dean felt his mouth tighten up, focused on Sam and how his brother was so reluctant to start eating. “No, I don’t. Trust me. It’s just the lack of food that’s making him obedient.”

“Jerk,” Sam grumbled, and took the first bite.

“Bitch,” Dean returned, out of habit, and then turned to Alexander, though his attention remained mostly on his little brother. “Do you have some juice or something that you could give him?” Alexander turned and exited the room without a word, and Dean returned his full attention to Sam, who had finished the green beans and was looking as though he was about to be sick. “Serves you right for not taking care of yourself while I’m in here,” he said. “I told you to be careful.”

“I am being careful,” Sam insisted, and started into the mashed potatoes.

“Bullshit.” He didn’t bother to hide how pissed he was, but Sam was so fucking stubborn. He knew then what had to give, and found himself even angrier that it had to be him. He was stuck in a nursing home, had been through surgery, and couldn’t even walk yet, and he had to give in? It sucked. It really sucked, but it would be okay, because a chick-flick moment later and Sam would fold like a house of cards.

Alexander returned, then, before Dean could start talking, and he had an entire tray in his hands. “I grabbed this from the kitchen,” he said by way of explanation, and set it in front of Sam.

Sam’s eyes lit up for an instant, and Dean was satisfied with the victory, even when his brother saw his face, read him correctly, and scowled. But he finished the sandwich, was still chewing when he lifted the lid off the tray and started into that. He looked better already, Dean noted, and he nodded to Alexander in gratitude.

He waited until the aide left, glanced over to the other side of the room and Mr. Andropoulos, who was eating his own food and watching TV. The little dude wasn’t paying them any attention at all, and Dean decided that it was about as good a time as any to spill his guts.

“There’s something going on here,” he said. “Our kind of thing.”

Sam looked up from his food, chewed thoughtfully. “What do you mean?”

Dean shrugged. “I don’t know yet. The folks I’ve been talking to just say that weird stuff is going on.” Which wasn’t exactly the truth. Blair had balked at that topic, backed off and told him that she couldn’t violate privacy laws when he asked for her to be specific. Even when he told her that he was a writer, she wouldn’t budge on the subject. And Karla, well, he had yet to actually hear her ghost story. It could be a complete wash.

But that red-haired dementia aide and her little tale, that had struck something in him, and though he wouldn’t admit that it was nowhere even close to proof, he believed it.

“That’s why you wanted my laptop? For research?”

Dean ignored the anger in Sam’s voice and shrugged. “I can’t do anything else, so I guess I get to be the geekboy sidekick for once.”

“Sidekick,” Sam repeated, then shook his head. He put down his fork, shoved the tray away, and glared at Dean, like he had the right to be angry after his own little stunt. “Look, don’t do anything stupid.”

“Funny, that’s what I was going to tell you.”

“Dammit, Dean, I’m serious!”

“So am I.”

And that was it, their entire discussion on it. Dean had spilled his side – well, most of it, anyway – and Sam have given up nothing in return. Sam got to his feet and made for the door. Leaving Dean. Always leaving. Dean resisted the urge to grow a set of ovaries and ask him to stay. The graveyard still needed to be dealt with, and Sam was the only one available for that.

So he let his brother go.

***

 

Sam was really more cut out to be the geekboy sidekick, Dean decided. After wasting a good hour searching on Google for anything beyond general information on the nursing home itself, he had absolutely nothing about the supposed ghost haunting the dining room. Not knowing much beyond what Karla had told him didn’t help. He had no name to use in the search through the obituaries, not to mention the local newspaper didn’t have an online archive of obituaries, anyway. What he did find out the name of the farm, Julienne, named after the family that owned it. The shelter had kept the name as well. Only two articles came through on it, one about the shelter itself, and the other on the sale and demolition. In short, he knew nothing, had wasted his time on nothing, and that pissed him off. A lot.

He thought about searching the internet for porn instead, but remembered his promise to Sam. Dean was a bit of a bastard – hell, a lot of one at times – but he was a man of his word. Even when it involved porn. Damn it.

He shut the laptop in frustration. There was nothing more he could do without more information, and he couldn’t get more information without, you know, more information. Or a geekboy sidekick. Who wasn’t exactly available. Damn it.

So Karla really was his only choice. Not that it mattered if she helped him or not, she would be a welcome distraction.

He shifted in his wheelchair for, like, the fourteenth time that afternoon, and went out into the hallway to look for his nurse. He needed more pain medication to concentrate. Of course, he could have pushed his call light and waited for help to come, but he was already bored as all hell. Besides, it had been awhile since he had last seen Alexander, and the man had looked busy. So, he took the more proactive approach.

Nurse Debbie was, luckily enough, standing right by the medication cart. He caught her eye and smiled, and she reached for the bottom drawer of the cart without his even asking. Dean decided then that he really liked her.

“Let me guess,” she said, handing him the little plastic cup. “You want something for pain?”

“You are a wonderful person,” he said, without really answering her. He took the pill, quite happily. And though he had discovered that it took almost half an hour for the medication to kick in, he sighed, “That hit the spot.”

“How’re you doing?” Nurse Debbie asked.

He shrugged. “I’m a little bored, so I’m going to wander over to meet up with a friend,” he explained.

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

Dean looked back and forth for a moment, like he was checking to see if anyone was listening in on their conversation, and then leaned in close to her and whispered, “I met her in therapy. She’s a real babe.”

“I’m assuming she’s an older woman,” Debbie said. She waved her hand at him in dismissal, and added, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Dean wasn’t sure exactly where to find Karla’s room, but as he wheeled past the therapy gym, he found a little sign on the wall that pointed him in the right direction. As long as he followed the signs, he could find his way back easily as well. As it turned out, room 406 was on the other side of the building, part of the other square. It took him a bit to find it, but he had time on his hands. Time to spare. Hearing the ghost story was probably going to be the most entertainment he’d had all day.

He came up on her room, turned the corner to go in. The bed by the door was empty, and the curtain was pulled halfway on the other side. He wheeled closer, calling out, “Karla? It’s Dean.” When there was no response, he added, “We met in therapy?” As he came closer, he saw someone lying on the bed, fully dressed and wearing shoes. He was pretty sure they were Karla’s shoes – not that he had been paying that close attention during therapy – and not some random strange woman’s, so he wheeled a little closer. “Karla?” he called again.

Then he saw her face.

There was a fundamental difference between a living body and one that was dead. He’d seen enough of both to be able to tell the difference at a glance. All of the color had gone out of Karla’s face, and she looked carved out of wax. Her eyes were closed, expression peaceful, so he wondered if she had lain down for a nap and then died.

He shook his head and reached for her call button.

It took the aide, a very young and petite girl, almost ten minutes to arrive. When she did, she frowned at him, like he was intruding on something, but stopped when he gestured to Karla’s body. She went white, and she vanished out of the door.

Dean left before the nurse arrived.

***

Nurse Debbie and Alexander both cornered him when he got back to the sub-acute unit. Dean couldn’t say he was really surprised. He’d been a suspect enough times to know the signs and symptoms. It was kind of a gut reaction to be cute and disarming, to use snarky comments and sarcasm, and he had to work hard to bite his tongue.

“What happened?” Nurse Debbie asked. “We got a call over from Intermediate Care. You found a patient dead?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied, and tried to wheel away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

They kept pace behind him, because face it, he wasn’t that fast in the wheelchair. “She was the friend you were going to see? The one you met in therapy?”

“Yeah. And now she’s a pile of cooling meat,” Dean snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

They let him go.

***

Alexander came to talk to him later, during dinner. He appeared in the middle of the meal, eyes down, face closed off, mouth parted slightly, like he was about to say something but had no idea how to start. After he’d been standing there longer than what looked socially comfortable, Dean took pity on him. “Am I some kind of pet project of yours?” he asked. Well, okay, if he was going to be honest, it was less pity and more annoyance. “Seriously, dude. This is getting creepy.”

Alexander shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m on break right now, so we have real time to talk.”

“I’m not really big on talking.”

“Too bad, because I want to talk.”

Jesus, the man was like Sam. Worse, actually, because Dean knew which buttons to push on Sam to get him to shut up and leave him the hell alone. Alexander was just as persistent and almost as annoying. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. You really want to talk? Really? Tell me about the ghost in the dining room.”

Alexander shrugged. “This for your book?” he asked.

“Yeah, it is.” Dean had to wonder just how he had heard that story. Karla was the only one he had personally told, and there was no way that she had shared the tale with Alexander. Unless there was something that the aide needed to get off his chest, like communicating with dead people. But, on the other hand, gossip was the only thing that traveled faster than light, and Dean had to admit that Karla had been a shameless gossip. Either way, if Alexander managed to get him the information he needed, then it was worth the talking. “So spit it out.”

Alexander took a deep breath, leaned forward on the bed, and began. “All right, here it is. Before this place was built, there was this farm—”

“I know that part,” Dean interrupted. “Julienne Shelter, for battered women. Get to the good stuff.”

“Are you telling this story or am I?” Alexander demanded.

Dean put his hands up in surrender. “Sorry, man.”

“No interruptions, okay?”

“Dude, just tell me about the fucking ghost!”

Alexander shook his head, but continued. “Anyway, as I was saying before I got cut off by an impatient bastard, there was this farm. The Julienne family owned the farm and sold it in the sixties. That’s when it became the shelter. From time to time, people reported furniture moving around, objects going missing and then turning up months later, words being written on the walls in blood. That sort of thing. Then, one of the kitchen workers reported seeing a white-haired woman in the hallway, wearing one of those old-style nightgowns. That worker walked out and refused to step foot inside the shelter again.”

“Scary,” Dean said, letting Alexander know just how much his ghost story sucked.

“I’m not done,” Alexander said. “Now, do you want to hear this or not?” Dean made a zipping motion across his mouth. “Good. Now, they say that even after the place was demolished, her spirit still stays. She haunts the dining room, which is why she gets called the ‘Dining Room Ghost’. No one knows who she was, or why she’s still here. All we know is that she appears sometimes, early in the morning, looking like she’s been startled from sleep. If you watch her, her mouth moves like she’s trying to say someone’s name but can’t.” He paused. Well, more of hesitated, really, shooting Dean the skeptical expression of someone who has seen something that they can’t quite explain and then was asked to explain it.

“You’ve seen her,” Dean said.

Alexander shook his head, looked down and away. That was the expression that said that he was going to spill everything, but didn’t understand exactly why. “I don’t know what I saw. I picked up one of the midnight shifts, had to run to the dining room for some sugar, for my coffee. I saw a figure in white, thought it was one of the patients.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t.”

Something about the story nagged at Dean. He had been past the dining room, earlier, on his way to see Karla, and it was nowhere near the hallway where the first two deaths seemed to have occurred. (There was the possibility that it was all a coincidence, but Dean had been raised not to believe in coincidences.) “What did you see?” he asked, and once again tried to put on Sam’s patented sympathetic puppy face. He didn’t know if it was successful or not, because Alexander refused to look at him.

“She looked scared, like she was lost. I went to ask her if she needed help, and she looked at me, but it was like she wasn’t really seeing me. And then it was like she was trying to say something, but couldn’t. She reached for me, but it wasn’t me, you know? Then she vanished. Like, poof.” Alexander looked up at him then. His face was closed off, shuttered and bolted and locked. “It was late and I was tired, I know...”

Dean shook his head. “No, sounds like a death echo to me. That’s, uh, a certain kind of haunting, where the spirit keeps reliving the moment of her death, over and over.”

He stared at him, long and hard before finally managing, “You’re serious.”

“Are you?” Dean asked. He leaned forward in his chair. “You’re not telling me this to yank my chain, right?” The look on Alexander’s face said otherwise. He didn’t say anything in response, but he didn’t have to. Dean could fill in the blanks on his own. “This is real, and you know what you saw. You’ve tried telling other people, and they don’t believe you.”

Alexander looked away. “I’m not like that kitchen lady. I can’t afford to walk out of here and expect to get another job. But I don’t pick up nights anymore.”

Dean relaxed muscles he hadn’t realized were tense. A death echo wasn’t really much to get up in arms about, especially as that one had been around for a while and hadn’t hurt anyone. Besides, there was something else that was nagging at him. “Hey, has she ever been seen outside of the dining room?” he asked.

Alexander frowned. “Not that I’ve heard of. Why?”

He rubbed his hand across his mouth, thinking hard. Unidentifiable ghost, never moving from one location, even after the original location was demolished. It sounded like something he might have come up with, during his four years without Sam. Some sort of binding, to make sure she was harmless. “A hunter’s been here before,” he said to himself.

“Like, a ghost hunter?”

Dean shook his head. If a hunter had been through before, then why were people dying? It wasn’t the doing of a death echo, that was for sure, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something there. So he had two options, really. Theory one was that it was a giant coincidence. The deaths were just old people doing what they did best, and the crazy guy predicting it all was actually just crazy. He liked that one. It sounded nice and boring.

Theory two was a lot less benign. Theory two was that the death echo was just a roommate, or a noisy neighbor, or something, catching more attention while something else was running around and killing people.

“Sir?” Alexander said, and Dean looked up at him with a start. “Are you okay?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

After dark, once Sam was done with the digging and they had time to talk about a plan, Dean wanted to go and see where the deaths had taken place. He was sure Sam was going to put up a huge fight about it, but Dean was the older brother. It would be nice to get some perks out of that job again.

***

Sammy didn’t arrive with sunset. Which, okay, wasn’t that big of a deal. He had been digging all day, so he probably wanted a shower. Wanted to wash away the smell that said, “Hey, I’ve been out desecrating graves!” When Sam didn’t arrive as night started to really set in, either, Dean called him.

“What?”

Sam’s voice, irritated, but alive. Perhaps a little raw as well. “You been out singing karaoke without me?” Dean asked.

“No, this jerk decided he needed to co-opt my laptop for his own half-assed research, so I had to entertain my own damn self. ‘I Spy’ is a two-player game, just so you know.”

His voice was definitely raw, and not the kind of raw that he got after singing in the car for six hours, either. Not that Sam normally spent any time singing in the car. Well, at least not anything good.

“Hey, everything going okay with the job?” Dean asked, trying to bite down on that pesky thread of worry.

“Fine.”

“So, the reason why you sound like you had the shit choked out of you is because you were talking yourself to death all day, right? You weren’t working after dark?”

“Look, Dean—”

“ _Sam._ ” Dean was seeing red again, twice in one day. That wasn’t a good sign. “You said you were being careful.”

“And I am, Dean, look—”

“ _Were you?_ ”

For a moment, Sam didn’t say anything. That was as good as a signed confession in Dean’s book. “I was almost done, Dean.” His voice was low, and if pressed Dean would have guessed that he was no longer trying to hide the pain from him. That was one victory. “He got me right before I lit him up, but I managed by myself. And now I know that I got at least one of them. That should help. At least.”

While it was nice that one of the ghosts had been taken care of, Dean was still pissed off about Sammy and his stupid fucking lying. “You could have been killed.”

“Oh, are we talking about that, now? Who’s the one who went through surgery, here? I don’t think it was me, Dean. If I remember correctly, you shoved me out of the way of a speeding car!”

“You could have been killed,” Dean repeated.

If he closed his eyes, he could see Sam’s face in his mind, screwed up in anger, probably scraped up from being tossed around by an angry spirit. “I am so not talking about this with you right now.”

“Well, tough!” Dean snapped. “I don’t want something to happen to you just because I’m not there!”

It was then that he registered that the other end had gone silent. The bitch had hung up on him.

He tossed the phone across the bed, even more pissed off, and riled up, too. He reached for the call light, pressed it before a plan even had the chance to enter his mind. He needed to get up, get out of there, to pace around, to work out his emotions in the only way he really knew.

It was time to kill some evil motherfucker.

***

The wheelchair was still stupid, and still way not stealthy. If he had to stay in it much longer, he was going to have Sam get some WD-40 and grease down whatever was making that goddamned squeak. Fortunately for him, the nurses station was empty, so there was no one there to stop him and ask him where he was going and why he was out of bed.

Dean wasn’t sure he would have had a good answer if they had been there. An answer, yes. He always had an answer. It didn’t mean that his answers were any good. Sam was the one with the awesome persuasive people skills, not Dean. So, the empty nurses station? One victory down. All he needed now was to figure out what the hell was killing people and stop it. Really, the hard part was already over.

The only time Dean hesitated in his journey was when he came face to face with a set of double doors. They looked a little like the fire doors that were placed in the hallway, except that they were closed. There were little windows set in the door, and he very carefully checked to make sure the hallway was clear before proceeding. He pushed one of the doors open, awkwardly, and managed to scoot through before it swung shut with a heavy thud.

Then he heard the metallic click. Dean turned in his seat to look at the doors. There was an electronic keypad next to it, and emergency exit instructions written on a brass plate, a little above his direct line of sight. The dementia unit was a lock-down ward, which he should have figured, and he had walked – er, rolled – right into it.

“Smooth, Dean,” he said to himself. Well, there was no sneaking out quietly, so there was no going back. He needed to get some answers, and he wasn’t going to get them by staring at a locked door.

The hallway wasn’t that long, and the rooms had some sort of weird numbering system that didn’t make any sense to him, but other than that, the rooms were set up like the sub-acute unit. The closer he got to the nurses station, the lower the numbers were, which meant that 703 was going to be pretty freaking close. That was a pain in the ass. Another one. So he moved slowly, which made the squeak just a little less noticeable, and took in his surroundings.

The lights were low in the hallway. Most of the rooms were pretty dark, which meant that in a pinch he could hide in the shadows. He could hear people moving around, close to the nurses station, and he could hear voices, raised and agitated. There was also a strange sound, a _squeak-thump-squeak-thump_ that he couldn’t identify. It didn’t sound like any kind of spirit or monster or anything Dean had ever come across before, but there was a first time for everything.

“Six six six, sixteen, sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, ninety-five...”

Someone was counting. Someone was counting and was crappy at it. It was a woman’s voice, headed his way, but moving slowly. The _squeak-thump_ was getting louder, too, and Dean ducked into one of the rooms, just in case.

He saw the hand, first, reaching forward and groping, and he was half a breath from pulling the butter knife he’d stolen out of his pocket when it was followed by the rest of a little old lady. She was in a wheelchair, too, but was seatbelted into place. The wheels of her chair were locked as well, but that didn’t seems to slow her down at all. She was the source of that strange noise, the lady pulling herself along the wall, dragging the wheelchair with her.

She came up to the doorway and stopped, her eyes falling on him. “Oh, hi,” she said, conversationally.

“Hey,” he returned, not exactly sure what was going to happen next. He’d dealt with a lot of people, but none of them were actually lock-down-ward crazy, and he wasn’t sure exactly how he should proceed. “How are you?” he tried.

“Oh,” she said, and shrugged. “I just miss the green planting. You know, the ha-ha ham hummer.” And she laughed, like she had told him a joke or something. “Usually I with the wan wonder wishing, but just the side.”

Dean wondered if maybe he was in a little over his head. Communing with crazy people was more of Sam’s thing. The way she talked kind of reminded Dean of him, of those early memories of Sammy, when he was little and starting to talk but didn’t know many real words.

He moved out, just a few inches out of the shadow, intent on moving on down the hall, when he realized that his wheelchair was a lot wider than the space the old lady had left for him. “You have me blocked in,” he told her, with a wave of his hand. Hopefully she would understand that much, and move.

“Oh god,” she said, and laughed again, “shoe shooing surgical chair for me, please?”

“Letty?” A voice called out. “Miss Letty!”

The lady turned her head towards whoever it was who called for her. “Letty Smith, RN,” she answered, then reached for the wall and started to move again. “Two three four, fourteen fourteen, forty-four...”

Dean scooted backwards, back into the shadows in the darkened room. He was stealth personified. He was so stealthy that the red-haired dementia aide he had encountered before didn’t notice him, not even when she came up behind the old lady. He watched her wheel the lady down the hall, towards the nursing station, with a brisk efficiency that startled him.

He waited for a few minutes, hoping that things would settle down a little so he could get to the meat of his investigation. But before he could even get back out into the hallway, or start moving down the next few rooms, he heard footsteps again.

They were faster than before, determined, if he could attach an emotion to the sound. The shelter of darkness around him felt tight and confining, and he cursed at the wheelchair, and his pelvis, and the stupid ghost that decided to run him down.

And then, there she was. The red-haired aide stood in the doorway, her eyes narrow and fixed on him. “Just so you know,” she said, quite casually, “I have really good night vision.”

***

She took him by the handles of his wheelchair and wheeled him down, right past that room. Dean craned his neck, but couldn’t see much more than a glimpse of what was in there – a single bed, two easy chairs, and a floor lamp – before he was whisked past. Close to the nurses station was also closer to pure chaos. The raised voices he had heard? Actually only one voice, and it belonged to a gaunt little lady, with long hair that fell wildly into her eyes. She was screaming, almost nonsensically, and when she saw Dean looking at her, she gestured for him to come closer.

She looked like something he should be killing, so he kept his distance. But she wasn’t the only patient up. There was also an old man, with sensible short hair and soft features, wearing bright blue pajamas. He sat at a chair behind the nurses station, like he was one of the staff, his arms folded and eyes shut. He looked almost serene. Dean wondered if he was sleeping, and if he was, how he could sleep through the unholy racket. (He made a mental note to say _Christo_ to the screaming lady, just in case.)

Also sitting there was an actual nurse. She was older, a little past middle-aged, with dark hair and bright eyes. She looked up as the aide wheeled him forward, and he met her look of surprise with a smile. “Hey.”

She smiled back, but looked up and past him, to the aide. “Who’s this?” Her voice was pitched high, piping, like a bird.

“I’m Dean,” he said, by way of greeting. The nurse smiled at him, a smile as bright as her eyes, and turned to fully face him. Her nametag said that her name was Grace. Dean wondered that the redhead was the only aide whose nametag he hadn’t seen. “I got a little lost, Nurse Grace.”

“You got more than little lost,” Grace explained. “This is the dementia ward.”

Like he hadn’t noticed already. “Well, it seems like a nice place,” he said, and turned his smile loose on her. “Already I’ve seen two beautiful women. One of them even has a name.”

Nurse Grace looked up and past him again. “Jen, your nametag is missing.”

Dean turned in his seat to look at the redhead. She was looking down at her scrubs, frowning. “Stupid nametag,” she muttered. “That’s the third time this week. The magnet’s weak, I guess. So, it keeps falling off. I need to get a new one.”

“You could just not wear the shirt,” Dean suggested. She snapped her head up to look at him, her mouth frozen in an open position. He grinned back at her, pretending to be oblivious to her reaction. “That removes the problem, right?” 

Nurse Grace cleared her throat, bringing Dean’s attention back to her. “So, where are you from?” she asked, like they were having a regular conversation, like it wasn’t the least big awkward at all.

He shrugged. “Oh, I’m from all over.”

“Sub-acute,” Jen said, and her voice was like ice. Granted, maybe it wasn’t the best line he’d thrown out, but there really was no reason for her to get all cold. She walked past Grace to a phone, not even throwing a look at him over her shoulder to say she was playing hard-to-get. “I’ll call.”

There was silence. Or would have been if the screaming lady would shut the hell up.

“Hey, Stacey, are you missing someone?” She paused, nodding to herself. “Young guy, cocky, in a wheelchair?” She paused again, then looked at Dean and scowled. “I don’t think he’s cute at all.” Which hurt Dean’s feelings – after all, he was adorable – but at least someone seemed to think he was cute. “Yeah, come and pick him up before I throw him out, okay? Thank you.” She hung up the phone and then walked off without saying another word.

There was a moment of silence, and then Grace smiled at him again. “Don’t mind her.”

“I don’t,” Dean assured the nurse. “She needs a little work on her bedside manner, but otherwise she seems fine.”

“So,” she began, and Dean interrupted her before she could get the rest of the question out.

“What am I in for?” he guessed. “Motor vehicle accident, broken pelvis. I was on foot.” He wondered why he felt the need to clarify that last point. Maybe to make the story consistent? He shrugged to himself. “And this is the dementia unit. I bet you have a lot of stories about this place—”

“Hey.”

Both Dean and Grace turned at the same time. The old man, who had been dozing in the chair, was awake. His eyes were fixed on Dean. He got up out of the chair, and came closer, his face very serious.

“You,” the man said. And then shook a finger under Dean’s nose, like he was being certain that Dean knew who he was talking about. “Yeah,” he said, like he was more sure of himself. “It’s you.”

“Michael, what is it?” Grace asked, and Dean felt a jolt go through him. Michael, the guy who had predicted three deaths. Two of which had happened. “Come here.” She got to her feet and reached for his hand, but Michael jerked away from her. His attention was completely on Dean.

“What is it?” Dean asked.

“Careful,” Michael said. “She’s watching you.” He glanced over at Grace. “You’re next. Then,” as he shook his finger at Dean again, “you.”

“Michael.” Grace’s voice was hard, serious. “What’s going on with you?”

Michael blinked, the strange determination gone. “Hey?” he asked. Then his eyes fell on Dean, like he was seeing him for the first time, and his expression lightened. “Hey.”

Grace turned back to Dean, her expression one of guarded relief. “He’s been like this recently. Don’t worry about it. He’s been saying there’s someone after me, too. I don’t know where he got it, or why it’s happening. It doesn’t take long for him to get back to his normal self, though.”

“It’s okay,” Dean said, keeping his voice casual even though his heart was racing and it was definitely not okay. “He’s a dementia patient, right? He doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

Unless, of course, it did.

***

Dean had a number of questions he wanted to ask of Michael, but couldn’t. Grace left him at the nurses station, had led the old man away to what Dean assumed was his room. So Dean had a few moments to himself to think, even though the screaming lady made hearing his own thoughts a little difficult.

_Careful. She’s watching you._

It was a warning, definitely, and the old man had been pretty serious about it. Dean was uneasy around psychics – _Sammy doesn’t count_ , he told himself, _not really_ – so he was uneasy about the warning. It was too vague to give him any real information. Even the “she” was suspect. It could mean that the thing behind the deaths was female, or that it was disguised as one, or any number of things.

He rubbed at his eyes. A headache was setting in, right behind the bridge of his nose.

“Mr. Applebaum?”

He looked up. It was Nurse Stacey, he could tell by her nametag, and she was cute and petite and had a short bob of curly brown hair. She was flanked on each side by Jen and another aide, Celia. Dean didn’t know why they were flying in formation, so to speak, but he could recognize an escort when he saw one. He smiled at Stacey, who returned the smile easily. “I got lost,” he explained, and then gestured to Jen and Celia. “So what’s up with the honor guard?”

“You’re funny,” she said.

Dean raised one eyebrow at her. “Cute, too. Or so I’ve heard.”

And god help him, she blushed. He definitely could have bagged her. He could have done her in the parking lot, she seemed the type. “Now, sir,” she said, trying to make her tone stern, and the effect totally lost by her smile, “we discourage people from wandering around the building in the dark.”

“There were lights on over here, so it wasn’t dark at all,” he protested mildly. “And I met some really friendly people, too.”

Jen took a step forward. “Sir. Kindly leave my unit,” she said. Her tone of voice made it an order, rather than a suggestion.

“I think I overstayed my welcome,” Dean said to Stacey in stage-whisper.

“Just a bit,” she agreed, and then grabbed the handles of his chair.

She pushed him down the hall, Jen and Celia half a step behind – which, shit, Dean had only _thought_ he hated before – until they got to the door and the electronic keypad. Celia stepped forward, and Jen stepped in front of Dean, effectively blocking him from seeing what code she was punching.

Not that Dean was looking there. Actually, he was looking at Celia’s right elbow, watched the way it moved, four quick but even jerks, two high, two low. It wasn’t as good as seeing the actual code, but it was enough to figure it out. The next time he went investigating, he would be prepared.

“It was sure nice to meet you,” he told Jen, letting the sarcasm bleed through into his voice. She scowled at him, like she’d taken lessons in bitch-face from Sam. It wasn’t fair that two people owned that expression, just like it wasn’t fair that Dean knew Sam would be aiming it at him when – _if?_ – Sammy came to see him in the morning.

He dismissed the thought. Obviously, he needed another pain pill if he was getting distracted while in the middle of an investigation. Not that he knew any more than jack shit. Sam was the one who could squeeze the little details out of people, not Dean, and his usual method wasn’t working on Jen or Grace.

But Stacey was eating directly out of his hand.

She took him back to his room and he turned on the charm, full-on disarming smile, a few not-so-discreet glances. Dean Winchester was back in business. “Sorry about the trouble I caused,” he said. “I know you must have been busy.”

“Just doing paperwork,” she replied, and then her voice dropped, all conspiratorially. “If I’d known how much paperwork went into being a nurse, I would have stayed an aide.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “But nurse sounds a lot sexier.”

“True, very true.”

There was a lull, and he could see that she wanted to stay and talk more, but couldn’t find a good excuse. So, he threw out the best line he had, “So, did you hear I’m writing a book?” Yeah, _that_ was his best line. It didn’t count, anyway. He was in a wheelchair and wasn’t allowed “strenuous physical activity” for almost six weeks. (Yes, the doctor had said, that meant sex.)

“Really?”

He nodded. “Yeah, and I found myself in the middle of a very interesting place, here. I’m writing about supernatural happenings, you know? Like hauntings, psychics, mysterious deaths, that sort of thing.” He shrugged, grinned and spread his arms wide. “For me, this is kinda like the best wet dream ever.”

Her face fell, ever so slightly, and he could tell that she was starting to really think about who he must be and why he had started wandering around. “There’s the dining room ghost,” she said, a note of false brightness in her voice. “But I don’t believe in ghosts. They’re not real.”

“You don’t need to believe in them for them to be real,” he assured her. She was a little jumpy, kept tucking the same strand of hair behind her ear. That was a signal if he had ever seen one, and in such a stupid, frustrating hunt, it was like a fucking holiday. Like getting his drivers’ license, getting the Impala, and getting laid all at once. “You know, Nurse Stacey,” he began, changing tracks, “I feel like I can really talk to you. You know? Like you’re the first person here who’s really listening.”

“We’re all invested in your care,” she said, and there was the professional tone. Hiding behind the job, pluralizing herself to include all of the other workers.

“Yeah,” he countered, “but you’re the one in here with me.” Dean shot a look over to the other side of the room, took note of the pulled curtain and soft breathing. The cabbage man was listening, he figured, so Dean was going to have to take a light touch with it. “I’m curious, is all. You know? Can’t blame a guy for being curious.”

Stacey didn’t reply, but she was biting her lip. Conflicted, perhaps? God, what he would have given to have Sam there to pry her apart. One look at his puppy eyes, and he could have had her laid open like a fucking book.

Dean leaned back in his chair, let defeat take over his features. “I guess I hit the wall. No more to it.” He shrugged, made himself lose eye contact, let the tiniest of tiny hints of disappointment come out in his voice. “Two men dead, another predicting deaths...”

“Three.”

Awesome, it worked!

“Three?” he asked, and though he tried, he knew he couldn’t keep all of the satisfaction out of his voice. “Tell me about the third.”

Stacey huffed, crossed her arms across her chest. “The first,” she said. “He was the first.” She looked away from him, towards the door. “I don’t know any details, and even if I did, it’s a HIPAA violation to talk about it.”

Dean held up his hands in defense. “Whoa, no need for all of that. I’m sorry I asked, okay?”

Her eyes slid from the door back to him, and there was the tiniest of smiles on her lips. “I suppose I could forgive you. Just maybe. But I really do need to get back to work.”

He let her go. She’d already given him plenty to work with.

***

Alexander wasn’t there in the morning. It was some other aide, Natalie or Natasha or something like that, and she woke him up before 7:30, which was a crime punishable by death in his book. But seeing as how she was cute and not his bitchy little brother, he decided to let her live. “At least get me some coffee,” he begged, as soon as the thermometer was out of his mouth. “I’ll even drink the stuff you guys serve here.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to help you get dressed,” she said as she walked out the door. “Then you can get your own coffee.”

It was more than just a few minutes until she returned; it wasn’t until breakfast. Anyway, the coffee sucked, the over-tanned bottle-blonde bitch nurse sucked, the creepy little roommate sucked, his morning sucked. Everything sucked. Even breakfast. Well, maybe not the bacon. Bacon was awesome.

But Sam wasn’t there.

On one hand, Dean was completely rational about it all. Sam had been choked by an angry spirit that he’d been in the middle of salting and burning, with no big brother to back him up. It was possibly that he was still in bed, an icepack pressed to his neck, doped up on some of the illegally obtained narcotics they kept in the first-aid kit. He liked that mental image, kept it in his head all morning, and though he wanted to kill the evil motherfucker that dared to lay a finger on his brother – even though it was already dead, twice – it was kind of soothing. Because it was so much better than what could be, what might have happened if the motherfucker had gotten lucky.

On the other hand, what if Sammy wasn’t there, wasn’t with him for another reason? Like, he had decided that he was done with his little quest for revenge? What if he decided that it was time to be a “real person” or whatever, to go back to Stanford, resume his life with his friends? Jessica had been gone for almost a year, the trail seemed pretty cold, and though Dad had said they were closing in on it, Sam didn’t listen.

Dean sat there in his chair, staring at his phone for most of the morning. Like he was channeling a fourteen-year-old girl. God, he needed to get out and kill something. All that sitting around by himself was having a bad effect on him.

“Waiting for a call?”

Dean turned the chair, reacting fast. Kathie stood there, one hand raised, lightly balled up, like she’d knocked but he hadn’t heard it. “Deciding if I should call,” Dean replied, pissed off that someone had seen him like that. “My – Sam hasn’t come in yet. That’s not really like him.”

“Hrm.” Kathie looked thoughtful. “He might be busy with something else. Maybe you should distract yourself for a while.”

“More strength training,” Dean muttered. “Yippee.”

“All right, then. How about something different?”

“Like what?”

A shrug. “Parallel bars? It would get you on your feet.”

That would be a change, and at the very least, it would be something to do for a little while. It would be one more step in getting better, to getting out of the wheelchair. He shrugged back at her. “Okay.”

Of course, the actual act of getting out of the chair by himself, of getting to his feet and walking, even with the support of the parallel bars, wore him down too quickly for his liking. But he walked. Not far, dammit, not for long, but he walked.

“Look,” Kathie said, after he had settled back into his chair and found a comfortable position – a tricky feat, most times. “I really wanted to apologize for what I said, yesterday. With Karla.” She dropped her head and wouldn’t make eye contact. “I feel really bad about it. I mean, you were just trying to make some conversation, and the way I acted was unprofessional.”

Dean took a wild guess. “You heard that I found her.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

Dean took a deep breath. He wasn’t any good at comforting people, not in the whole traditional sense of the word, and the subject was still a little touchy with him, too. Not Karla, exactly, but death. “Here’s the great thing about life,” he said, “it ends. Now, that also happens to be the worst part, too, but you gotta take the good with the bad. I saw her. She was in bed. She looked like she was at peace.” Kathie lifted her head to look at him, eyes deep and searching. He rubbed at the back of his neck, ducking away from the intensity of her expression. “I don’t know, a lot of people would like to go that way, in their sleep, rather than the alternative.”

“You’re not troubled by it?” Kathie asked.

Dean shrugged. “Of course I’m troubled.” But when he decided to start regretting deaths, only one face came to mind, and it wasn’t Karla. “But look at it like this – her last day on earth was kickass.” He forced himself to smile. “It had to be, you know? She met me. And she had plans, was having a blast. That’s what makes it sad, you know, for us.” He shrugged again. “Not for her. She just got interrupted, that’s all.”

“You’re really philosophical about the subject,” she noted. “You’ve dealt with death recently?”

He shook his head. It was one thing to try to comfort a civilian, it was quite another to talk about his own emo moments, and he’d been having several that morning already. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“Some other time, perhaps?” There was a hopeful note in her voice.

He shook his head. “No. Really. I’m not the caring and sharing sort. Too, um, butch.”

And then Kathie laughed. Dean wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted. He decided on slightly indignant, scowled at her, but it didn’t matter. The tension was broken, the seriousness gone, and the chick-flick moment was over, without Sam ever knowing about it.

Sammy.

...Damn. Emo was back.

***

The good news was that Sam did show up. The bad news was that he managed to show up in the middle of Dean having his groin incisions looked at. If that wasn’t awkward, then Dean didn’t know what was. There he was, shirt pulled up and pants pulled down, and Sam just walked in, pulled back the curtain, and stared.

Well, okay, the incisions stilled looked kind of bad. They were about four inches long, each, and they were all red and swollen, but that was a part of the healing process. Both Sam and Dean had been through it enough times to know that. So Dean did his best to defuse the tension – again with that, it was getting old – and pointed to the one on the left.

“I hear chicks dig scars,” he said.

Sam tried not to laugh, and slapped him on the arm.

The bottle-blonde nurse looked between them and backed off without a word. He’d already learned that she was a bitch, but as a perk, she was also closed-minded. Interesting, seeing what he knew about her personal life. Damn, gossip was awesome sometimes.

“Wondered when you’d show,” Dean said, carefully casual. He prided himself on managing to say _when_ and not _if_ without hesitation.

“We should talk,” Sam said, and his voice was still a little gravelly. He wasn’t wearing one of his _Dean-we-need-to-talk-about-our-feelings_ faces, either. “Let’s go for a walk, okay? Change of scenery.”

“Thank god.” Dean pulled up his pants and, reaching out one hand to Sam for support, pivoted his own self into the wheelchair. “Let’s go.”

The parking lot was long and narrow, but it was private enough. More private than the room, at least. Sam walked, Dean rolled, and they made it down to the front of the building before Dean brought it all to a stop.

“Okay,” he said. “Come down to my level and show me.”

Sam heaved a sigh. “Fine.” He crouched next to the chair and opened up his collar. There it was, dark, livid bruises standing out against Sam’s tanned skin. “It was a good thing,” Sam insisted.

Dean nearly choked. “The hell do you mean by that?” he demanded.

Sam stood up again, shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I started thinking last night. That ghost, he was pretty pissed off, right? So this morning, I visited the library, did a little searching. R.J. Sawyer, that was the guy that attacked me last night. Well, turns out that he had a history of mental disorder. A ‘weak mind,’ they used to say. But he could get violent. The family kept him at home a lot, and when he died, they buried him on the edge of the family lot, so that he wouldn’t disturb the rest of the others, or something.”

“So what did you find?”

“A mass grave,” Sam explained, and his face was lighter than Dean had seen it in a long time. “It was there the whole time, right next to him. Like he was keeping a watch on them, or they were keeping a watch on him. I don’t know which.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, the job is done.”

Dean let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. “So no more stupid stunts, right?”

Sam ducked his head, tried to fold up and shrink in on himself. Kind of funny to watch, since he was such a giant. “Look, Dean, about last night. I’m sorry.”

Dean shrugged. “Forget about it,” he said. “I was just worried about you. I don’t like not being there to watch your stupid back. Honestly? I would have done the same thing.”

“Yeah, now about that...”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Are we really going to talk about this?” He grabbed the wheels of his chair and rolled away, Sam following behind him by half a step.

“Yes, Dean. Dean!”

He rolled to a stop, but kept his back to his brother. “What now, Sam? I jumped in front of a car to save you. I would do it again in a heartbeat. You’re my brother. It’s my job.”

Sam didn’t say anything at first, and when he did, it wasn’t on the topic he thought they were talking about. “Do you remember that night, before I left for Stanford?”

Holy shit.

Dean turned in the chair to look at Sam, to see his expression, but he had his head down, and that stupid floppy hair was falling over his face. “Yes,” he said. “That’s not the sort of thing you just up and forget. But it’s not something that you talk about, either.”

“Dean.” Sam lifted his head a little, just enough so that his eyes peered through the messy mass of hair, all lost and alone. “It’s been almost five years.”

“We’re not talking about it,” he said, and started to roll away again.

And stopped.

“Look, Dean, I think I understand where you’re coming from—” Sam cut himself off, and Dean figured he must have read something in him, some silent communication, like they used to have before Sam left him behind.

One of the cars, a little blue Honda Civic, had a hand in the window. As they came closer, Dean saw that the hand was still attached to an arm, but the angle of the wheelchair prevented him from seeing anything more. The hand and arm looked dried out, like an old piece of jerky.

“There a body?” he asked, and Sam peered in through the driver’s side window.

“Yeah,” Sam replied. “Looks like she’s been sitting there for a while, too. Grace.”

Something like an electric shock went through Dean. “What?”

Sam looked at him, brows furrowed. “Her nametag. It says her name is Grace.” He touched one of the handles of Dean’s wheelchair. “We should go inside, tell someone. Then we can look up missing persons, see who she is.”

“Older woman?” Dean asked. “Dark hair?”

Sam looked again. “Yeah.”

Dammit. “She works here,” Dean explained. “I met her last night. She works on the dementia unit. Remember how I said there was something going on?”

“She’s the latest victim?” Sam asked, voice tight. He backed away from the car, pulled Dean with him. “Let’s go. You need to stay away from this.”

“Sam.”

“Seriously, Dean.” His voice was rising. “We’re not involved in it, we’re not working it, and you’re going to stay as far away from this as you can, got it? You’re not healed yet. You can’t even walk!” Something desperate was in his tone, and Dean could recognize the fear and panic. Unfortunately, he’d had some experience with it recently.

“Sam,” he said again, with more force. Sam fell quiet, and Dean could swear up and down that the guy was using his psychic crap to read his mind.

“No. You’re not involved.” It sounded like denial, and it sounded like Sam knew it was denial.

Dean shrugged. “One of the dementia patients is predicting the deaths. He said that ‘she’ was after Grace. And he said that I’m next.”

***

 

Sam came back to his room right before dinner, a box in one hand and a stack of papers in the other. Mr. Andropolous was gone, was waiting for his tray in the haunted dining room. Dean got the feeling that the creepy little old dude was getting sick of him. Dean was already sick of him and his smells. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Sam set the box down and checked the room for him as Dean swung his legs out of bed.

“He’s gone,” Dean assured him.

“Good,” Sam said, and then shut the door. He paused for a moment at Dean’s bedside, then pulled the orange curtain as well. “You know, I don’t think they’re going to let you outside without a doctor’s note. That’s two dead bodies you’ve found.”

Dean shrugged. “Technically, I didn’t find the second one. You did.”

Sam exhaled. “Whatever.” He shook the stack of papers at Dean. “Okay, first. Grace Carey. The medical examiner put her time of death around four days ago.”

“How’d she die?”

“Dehydration.”

She wasn’t dehydrated, she was freaking mummified, but Dean was too tactful to point that out. All he said was, “She was alive last night.”

Sam shrugged. “Shapeshifter?”

“No.” There couldn’t be three different supernatural beasties haunting the halls of the stupid nursing home. Two was a stretch, but possible. Three? No way. “It all has to do with whatever’s going on here. Did you check out that name?”

Sam sighed. “You didn’t give me much to go on.”

He hadn’t been able to give Sam much of anything. All he knew himself was guessing from circumstantial evidence, a fragment of conversation and the knowledge that Michael had predicted one death prior to the others. Dean knew Sam, however, knew that tone of voice, knew the face his brother wore when he’d found another piece of the puzzle. “But you found him.”

“Yes, I found him. Because I’m awesome. Professor Donald King, taught at a local university for thirty-eight years, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years ago, died two weeks ago, here.” Sam looked up from the papers. “The first of your killing spree, apparently. He was a no-code, do not transfer, do not resuscitate, but luckily there was an autopsy.” Sam looked back down at the papers and scratched at one eyebrow, absently. “Uh, he died of dehydration, but the ME stated that some of his organs were desiccated.”

“Desiccated,” Dean repeated. “Like, dried up?”

“Yeah. His heart, kidneys, and liver, specifically.”

Dean nodded, then gestured back to the stack of papers. “And the others?”

Sam cleared his throat, shuffled the papers, and nodded at the box on the bed. “You should eat that.”

That was a bad sign. “You bring me some pie?” Dean asked, and opened the box. “Hot damn, you did.”

“It’s good pie,” Sam added. “You’ll like it.”

The pie was chocolate cream and strawberry, a combination that Dean said was too girly to eat but secretly loved. Dean took a bite, all wary of what it had to mean. Sam never did shit like that without there being some big reason behind it all, and for a moment, he panicked at the thought of Sam bringing up That Night again.

But Sam just shuffled his papers again and continued. “Next, from what I can gather, is Dmitri Stamapolous. Hospice patient, actively dying. No autopsy was done on him, but some of the nursing notes state that he had ‘poor skin turgor’, which is a sign of dehydration. After that is Harrold Caincross. Cause of death, dehydration.”

Dean put his pie down. There, a pattern. Finally. Though he was also afraid of what Sam was going to say next. “And Karla?”

Sam cleared his throat. “Ah. Karla Ferguson. Cause of death, dehydration.”

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, furious. “Her organs dried up?”

Sam tossed the papers onto the bed. “Yeah. Harrold Caincross, too. But only Grace was mummified.”

“It’s getting stronger,” Dean realized. “Taking whatever it’s taking from younger victims. Healthier victims.” He cocked his head at his brother, who was still looming over him. Sammy was at once cute and irritating when he got protective like that. “We got any clue what this thing is?”

Sam shrugged. “Well, there are a few different things that feed off of the life of others. Psychic vampire—”

“Which don’t normally kill, you know that as well as I do.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, and his voice was dangerously casual, “and vengeful spirits don’t normally waltz across protective lines, but sometimes these things don’t pay attention to the rules.”

Still angry about the graveyard, Dean noted, even after the job was done. Damn but the boy held grudges. “Okay,” he said, cutting through the air with one hand, bringing the topic back to the hunt at hand. “Psychic vampire is a possibility. What else?”

“Gaki.”

They shivered together. Gaki were fucking creepy things, cursed with insatiable hunger and very small mouths. “I hate those,” Dean muttered. “But there’s been five deaths in two weeks. Gaki can’t eat that fast.”

Sam tossed himself down on the chair next to Dean’s bed. “That’s what I thought, too. There’s also an edimmu.”

Dean frowned. “Dad ran into one of those once, didn’t he? Sumerian creature, possesses people and eats their, uh, vital fluids, right?”

“Which could also explain the mummification.”

But an edimmu was a spirit. Was non-coporeal, to use one of Sam’s favorite college-boy words. And the way Michael said ‘she’, like it was a person, bothered him. It didn’t sound like a spirit, even if it was wearing some poor person’s meat. “I think,” Dean said carefully, “that we need to talk to the one person who seems to know what’s going on right now.”

Sam’s head jerked up. “That dementia patient,” he said, voice quiet.

“Which means,” Dean said, “that I need you to get me some WD-40.” He pointed to his wheelchair. “That thing squeaks, and this operation calls for some Winchester stealth.”

Sam got to his feet, mouth pinched into a hard, thin line. “Eat your pie,” he said.

***

They set out after dinner. Sam insisted on pushing the wheelchair, and after a bit of a fight about it, Dean even let him. It made Sam feel better, and was a hell of a lot faster than wheeling himself around, anyway. They headed up front, passed by Nurse Cara at the nurses station, who stopped them at the medication cart.

She looked him over, eyes hard but casual. She’d been a nurse for a long time, he’d learned, and had seen everything there was to be seen. He put on a smile, hoping that she couldn’t read his intent to go poking around where they didn’t belong. Not that he would have been surprised if she could. There was something about that nursing home that put him on edge.

Dean suspected it was the dead bodies that were piling up.

“Evening, Nurse Cara.” He was just a regular guy, out for a stroll with his, uh, whatever she thought Sam was to him.

“You need drugs?” she asked. Cutting to the chase, like she always did. It was one of the things that Dean liked about her. “You can get some if you need it.”

“Nah,” he said, even though the ache was starting up again. It wouldn’t do to have his senses dulled by narcotics. He needed to be sharp. “I’m fine.”

Sam shifted behind him. “Dean, maybe you should—”

“I’m fine,” Dean repeated. Sam heard the tone in his voice, subtle, and went still. “We’re just going for a walk,” Dean continued. “Inside, and away from people, if we can manage it.”

“All right.” Nurse Cara looked up at Sam. Damn the woman was short, she had to really crane her head at him. “You better keep an eye on this guy. He’s been causing a stir ever since he was admitted. So do me a big favor and keep numb-nuts here out of trouble.”

“Numb-nuts?” Dean repeated, not entirely sure he heard her correctly.

“Numb-nuts,” Cara said again. Another point in her favor, she wasn’t afraid of being crude in front of him. He just didn’t like the idea of her insulting his junk.

He turned in his chair to shoot an indignant look at Sam, but the little bitch had a smirk on his face and was trying to hide it. “You think that’s funny? She called me numb-nuts!”

Sam cracked up.

“Numb-nuts,” Dean muttered to himself. He shot a dark look at Nurse Cara, who was immune to his dark looks, apparently. She smiled faintly at him, like she found him cute – he was adorable, thank you – and waited for Sam to stop laughing.

Sam looking happy didn’t happen very often, not anymore. Dean felt his lips twitch upward in spite of everything. He looked so adorably _stupid_ when he laughed.

“There,” Cara said, startling him. “You two looked as serious as a heart attack. I had to do something.” Then she shook a finger at Dean, and he was reminded of Michael doing that exact same thing. “But I mean it about staying out of trouble, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he lied. “I promise.”

Sam wheeled him away, turned down the hallway that led to the rest of the building, and was otherwise very quiet until he giggled to himself, “Numb-nuts.”

“Shut up,” Dean hissed. Seriously, what kind of guy giggles, anyway? He shook his head and pointed to the double doors. “There. Go in there.”

They pulled up to the doors, but Sam stopped short. “Security?” he asked.

Dean shook his head. “Electric lock, keypad release, four digits. I didn’t see the code, but I can guess.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I heard you the first ten times. Let’s go.” Dean grabbed the wheels of his chair, shoved himself forward to the door and let himself in. He heard Sam’s quiet footsteps a moment later, following right behind him.

It was earlier in the day than Dean’s last visit, and as a result the hallway was a lot more crowded. The noise level, too, was higher. Many different voices, the patients talking to themselves, talking to each other, and the creepy screaming lady screaming in full force. Every now and then, Dean would catch sight of the navy blue scrubs that the aides wore, and Sam would jerk his wheelchair into a room.

At least the squeak was gone.

Somehow, they made it up the hall to 703, Michael’s room, without incident. Dean did have to hiss at Sam to ignore some of the patients, like Letty the counting lady and this one guy who was chewing on his own knuckles. Michael was sitting in one of his easy chairs, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded, eyes closed. He wore the serene expression Dean had seen on him before.

“This is him?” Sam asked.

Dean nodded, then nudged the old guy’s shoulder. “Michael,” he said. “Michael, we need to talk to you.”

Michael opened his eyes, but his expression remained the same and he said nothing.

“So,” Sam said, after a long silence, “any idea how we’re going to do this?”

Dean shrugged. Okay, so he hadn’t really thought about that part. He’d kind of hoped that Michael would just start talking. “He’s psychic, you’re psychic. Bond with him.”

Sam huffed and rolled his eyes. “You really think he’s psychic? He could just be eerily accurate with his predictions.”

“You really want to take that chance?”

“No.” Sam dropped into a crouch in front of Michael, the broad line of his shoulders tight. Dean waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just kept staring at Michael, his jaw clenched.

When everything was done, Dean promised himself, he was going to take Sam out to a bar, get him wasted, and throw him at one of those bookish librarian types that he liked. His brother was too wound up, too tense, and Dean had to admit that he wasn’t in the best of positions to reassure him that everything was going to be just fine. The universe liked to take a shit on the Winchester family, and the two of them were already wading knee-deep in it.

“You okay?” he asked Sam.

“Do you think...” Sam started, then trailed off and fell silent.

He didn’t need to finish his sentence. Dean knew what he meant, knew because under it all, he wondered the same thing. “This isn’t going to happen to you,” he said. Michael looked at Sam, then back to Dean, expression pleasant but blank.

Sam got to his feet again. “Okay,” he said, acknowledging the silent promise. “Okay.” He took a few deep breaths, like he needed to steady himself, and Dean rolled closer, bumped Sam’s elbow with his shoulder. Another silent promise, _I’m here_.

Michael got to his feet. He brushed something off the leg of his pants, then straightened his shirt. His actions were casual, no hint of worry or concern, nothing at all like he’d been before. “I think this is a bust,” Dean muttered, but then Michael turned to them and gestured towards the door.

“Let’s see what he wants,” Sam said.

“This way,” Michael said, but his tone was like his body language. He led them out into the hallway, and started towards the nurses station. Dean figured they were just a minute or two from being discovered.

“Do you think this is the psychic thing?” Sam asked in low tones.

Dean shook his head, but kept his eyes on Michael. “No, this isn’t like how he was when he warned me. It’s like he’s got two modes. That,” he jerked his chin forward, “and the psychic mode. He’s all freaky driven in psychic mode.”

Sam exhaled slowly. “So this is just the dementia, I guess.”

“I guess,” Dean agreed, and wheeled himself after Michael. He took them up to the nurses station, where Nurse Stacey was sitting, two large binders laid open in front of her. She looked up at Dean in surprise, then looked up and behind him at Sam. Dean read a flash of conflicting emotions on her face and opened his mouth before she could kick him out and send him back to his room. “Hey, Stacey. Didn’t expect to see you here. I wanted to come over and give my condolences to the staff. You know, because of Grace.”

Stacey nodded. “Yeah. I heard you found her.”

Dean nodded. “Kind of freaky, isn’t it? So many people dying like this.”

Stacey got to her feet suddenly, palms flat on the desk, her eyes very dark. “This isn’t some ghost story, sir. Grace worked here for fifteen years. Her death is strange and tragic, but isn’t any business of yours.”

“Hey,” Sam cut in gently, “calm down. Don’t mind this guy, he’s all story first, screw everything else.”

“I resent that,” Dean muttered, but Sam wasn’t listening, and neither was Stacey. Sam had on his Captain Empathy face, the one that got people to spill even the most ridiculous of details, and Stacey was eating it up. Oh well, maybe there was something more that Stacey hadn’t told him. Maybe there was another detail that would pull everything together. Anyway, watching Sam while he was working someone over wasn’t really all that high on his list of things to do. He kept an ear open to listen for details, but mostly his attention was on Michael.

“Fifteen years is a long time,” Sam’s voice rumbled, the familiar low, reassuring tone. “She must have known just about everyone here.”

Michael took a seat behind the nurses station, sitting like he had the previous night, in that serene pose. But his eyes were open and fixed on Dean. Despite that, he didn’t really think that they were going to get anything out of the old guy. Living with Sam and his visions had taught him that predictions didn’t come just because someone wants one. 

“Just about, I think. Look, this probably sounds a little weird and all, but I have some questions.”

“Questions?” Sam asked. “What kind of questions?” Dean turned to look at Stacey, curious. She was shaking, just a little. Perhaps a bit pale. It was interesting, and it was also at odds with how she had been the previous night. Something had changed between then and now. Something more than Grace’s death? He didn’t know.

“You saw her, right?” Stacey asked. She shot a look to Dean, and sort of shrugged. “I just want to know how it happened.”

Sam shot a look at Dean, too, a silent question on his face. “You saw her,” Dean answered with a shrug, “not me.”

“Ah,” said Sam. Always the smooth one with the ladies. “I couldn’t really tell.”

“Was she pale?” Stacey asked. “Blue? Flushed and rosy?”

“None of the above,” Sam answered. “She looked, you know, kind of... uh. I really don’t know, I’m sorry.”

Rescue time. Sam obviously had no idea what to say, which was unusual for him, so Dean wheeled up behind him and bumped his elbow again. Sam turned, trailing off from whatever he was about to say to Stacey. “You’re ready to go already?” he asked, frowny face in place. “But we were going to talk to the aides.”

“I think I need that pain pill now,” he explained.

Several expressions passed over Sam’s face. _But we haven’t gotten the information we came for!_ was one. Another was, _This investigation is putting too much of a strain on your frail body!_ Followed up by, _I am an emo, guilt-ridden little girl._ Well, okay, maybe he was reading between the lines on that last one. “Okay,” Sam said. “Let’s go.”

He took the wheelchair by the handles and started for the hallway, but they didn’t make it very far. Jen came around the corner, out of an alcove, with no warning, and they almost collided. Jen nearly fell over, and Sam nearly jerked Dean right out of his chair. If he hadn’t needed the pain pill before, he sure needed it after that.

“Wow,” Jen said, looking up at Sam, her voice slightly awed. “You’re tall.”

Sam shifted behind him, embarrassed by his size. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I get that a lot.”

“Good evening,” Dean said, giving her another one of his adorable smiles. “How are you?”

“Could be better, could be worse,” she replied, but at least she was polite about it. “How are you feeling?”

Dean shrugged. “About the same. I’d be doing a lot better if you’d let me work on some of my physical therapy with you. Naked. In lime jello.”

“Dean!” Sam warned.

“What are you even doing over here?” Jen demanded, the thin polite veneer gone. “You don’t belong here. You belong over there,” she jerked her head back towards the sub-acute unit, “with the rest of the assholes. This place is for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia – people who can’t _help_ their behavior.”

“I didn’t see any signs telling me to keep out,” he countered.

“Funny, I thought that me telling you to keep out would be enough,” she snapped back. Then, just as suddenly as she had exploded, she stopped. “Stacey!” she called out, “I’m taking fifteen!” Then she turned on her heel and left.

“Why’s she so pissed at you?” Sam asked.

Dean shrugged. He had no idea. It was like she had it out for him since day one. Everything he did set her off, and while he would freely admit that he could get under the skin of just about anyone, he wasn’t even doing anything special. Just being himself was enough.

“I’m sorry.”

They turned.

Stacey had come up behind them, quietly, and her face was serious. “Something’s been up with her, lately. Even before Grace’s death.” She crossed her arms across her chest, but the gesture wasn’t defensive. It was more like she was hugging herself, trying to comfort herself.

“Really?” Dean asked, and he had to fight to keep the snark out of his voice. “That’s not her normal personality?”

Stacey shook her head, and brushed a stray brown curl behind one ear. “No, she’s usually pretty kind and gentle. I mean, she’ll bitch and swear with us, but that’s different. _This_ is different.” She shook her head again. “I don’t know. It’s like she’s turned into her evil twin or something.”

Sam didn’t move, didn’t budge an inch, but Dean could see the tension go up his spine. He understood, felt the same thing. “How long has she been acting like this?” Sam asked.

Stacey shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know. About two weeks?”

Well, shit.

***

Stacey insisted on escorting them off the unit again, but at least she didn’t make a big show of blocking their view of the exit code. _1-3-7-9_ , which was pathetically easy to break, but the place was made for keeping a bunch of old crazy folk in. Not the Winchesters.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said as she let them out. “About Grace. I want to know what happened, too.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” she said, but she was smiling at him again. “Maybe you’re just a funny kind of guy.”

“I told you,” Sam interjected, “he’s all goal-driven. Doesn’t let anything else get in his way.” Which sounded to Dean like some sort of jab at his sex life, but then again Sam was a natural-born cock block.

“I’d kick you,” Dean promised quietly, once they were out of Stacey’s earshot, “if I didn’t think it would hurt too much.”

“Grow up,” Sam returned, but he was smiling again, and dammit if that wasn’t a good sight to see.

Dean scowled anyway – he did have standards – and took control of his chair, wheeling ahead of Sam, Sam following close behind. As they were going past the line of offices that flanked the hall back to sub-acute, a voice stopped them. “Going for a walk?”

It was Kathie. She was set up in one of the offices, door wide open, papers in front of her. Sam went back to looming in an instant, moved himself in front of Dean like he was an invalid or something. “Dude, it’s my physical therapist.” Dean shoved his brother aside and rolled closer. “What are you still doing here? It’s late.”

Kathie shrugged. “Just finishing up some paperwork. About ninety percent of this job is paperwork, and I hate it.” She wrinkled her nose and shoved the papers away. “How about yourself? It’s getting late. You should be relaxing in bed, resting up for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Dean asked.

She smiled. “John should be back from his vacation. If you think I’m hard on you, you should see what he has planned.”

Sam cut in, though his voice was gentle. “We were talking to the folks on the dementia unit. Giving our condolences.” Kathie’s face filled with confusion and something else that might have been concern.

“You didn’t hear,” Dean guessed. “The night nurse over there, Grace, she was found dead this morning.”

“Oh god,” Kathie moaned. “That’s awful. She just got married, too. They were about to take their honeymoon.” Her voice dropped, and her eyes fell to the floor. “She was so happy, so alive.”

That niggled something in Dean’s mind, something that sounded familiar. “Hey, Sam, let’s let Kathie get back to her paperwork.” He smiled at her, shrugged a little. “Sorry to bring bad news.”

She looked up at them and shrugged back. “It’s okay. I would have heard eventually.” Then her head dropped down again and she shook it. “I just think it’s tragic,” she whispered. “A young life cut off like that...”

They made it down the hallway, not quite back to the sub-acute unit, but far enough that Kathie wouldn’t hear them, when Dean stopped. “Something’s bothering me.”

“You mean besides that aide?”

“Yeah. This thing, this whatever it is. It’s sucking life out of people, right?” At Sam’s shrug, he continued, “So, what happened with Grace? It was keeping a fairly low profile, and then it mummifies her. That doesn’t make sense.”

“If this thing is Jen, or is possessing Jen, maybe people are starting to catch on that she’s acting suspicious. Or maybe it was really hungry.”

“I don’t know. I think the son of a bitch is an edimmu. I just don’t understand what’s going on.”

“You’re thinking too hard about this,” Sam told him, and grabbed the chair again. Dean leaned back and let him push. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Look who’s talking,” Dean returned. “You look worse than I do. You been sleeping at all?”

“Hey, man. I’ve been busy, remember?”

Dean shrugged. “You’re not busy anymore.” And fuck the lack of ovaries, he needed to keep his baby brother close for a while. “C’mon, stay the night.”

Sam hesitated, but Dean didn’t need to look at his face to know that he was about to crumble. “Okay,” he breathed.

***

They got a footstool for his legs, and Sam stretched out in the chair next to Dean’s bed. Nurse Cara looked entertained by the arrangement, but it didn’t matter at all. Once Sam was there, covered up, he was out like a light. Dean knew his brother’s insomnia, knew how hard it was sometimes for Sam to fall asleep, and once again had to wonder how much rest he had gotten while Dean wasn’t there.

Stupid fucking graveyard.

As for Dean himself, it was funny how soothing it was to hear the loud, obnoxious breathing sounds Sam always made. In the years that Sam spent at Stanford, Dean never got used to not hearing him at night. Sometimes he had even woken up, searching, confused that Sammy wasn’t there. With his brother sleeping by his side, though, everything seemed a little better. Even if it was still all shitty, he thought sleepily, at least they were together.

What woke him up again was the knowledge that Sam was missing.

It came to him before anything else, before he was aware of who he was or what he was doing or any of the details of the hunt. He had gone to sleep with Sam’s mouth-breathing at his side, and now it was gone.

Dean had a good long moment of confusion before he fully woke up and took stock of his situation. Which was, in a word, pretty fucking critical. He was no longer in his room, nor was he, in fact, in his own clothes. He was dressed in generic hospital scrubs, he was handcuffed, his arms pinned behind his back, and he was tied to a regular chair. How he had managed to sleep through all that, he wasn’t sure, but he had an idea.

Whatever the supernatural beastie was, Michael had made it clear that he was a target. And it was a supernatural beastie that could drain victims of life and make them pass out. Cross gaki off the list for good, Dean was now positive they were dealing with an edimmu.

“Well, fuck,” he muttered.

“You’re awake.” A voice, from behind him. Close and familiar.

“Jen,” Dean said, identifying it easily. “Long time no see.”

***

Dean kept himself mostly still, just turned his head from side to side, assessing the situation. Tactically, he was in a bad position. It looked like he was in some sort of basement, the unfinished kind that cropped up a lot in middle-class suburbia. Light streamed in through small windows, casting a lot of the basement into shadow. From what he could see, the contents were pretty neat, well kept. There were metal shelves lined with dusty boxes and old canning jars. A few pieces of furniture were there as well, covered in old sheets. Dean could imagine the rest of the house just from the details he could see. Craftsman style home, or Colonial, maybe. Traditional furniture, flocked wallpaper, those old-style radiators and everything.

Not that he knew that much about houses or decorating, but Sam had a weird thing for those home-makeover shows, which was why Dean tried not to let him control the channel when they got a motel room with cable. Dean had picked a few things up from those shows, the least of which was that he found them to be completely creepy.

From what he could see, it really didn’t seem like the sort of place Jen would live, but he had more important things to think about. Like getting out of the Basement of Death alive. He pulled at his bonds again. One hand was tied behind his back, an experimental tug told him that it was tied to the back of the chair he was sitting in. His other hand was handcuffed to something behind him, something that he couldn’t see but that had a little bit of give to it.

He twisted his hand, grabbed at the chain of the cuff for more leverage, and tugged. Even turned in his seat as far as he could manage – which, with the way he was tied down, wasn’t far – he couldn’t check that nasty blind spot, right where Jen was standing. He could hear her, though, shifting around, making soft little noises, like she was working on something. Knowing she was there, right behind him, made Dean want to stab things in the face.

“Stop that,” she said, and it took him a minute to realize what she was talking about. He tugged on the handcuffs again, just a little harder, and she repeated herself, irritation in her voice, “I said stop that. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“I try,” he said. Whatever he was cuffed to wasn’t moving, and while he could hear the rattle of the cuffs, they didn’t seem to be rubbing against anything that he could identify. He tried the rope on his other hand, but the edimmu must have possessed a boy scout at some point, because there was no give. But it wasn’t so tight that his fingers were tingling, either. Of course, the edimmu wanted him as undamaged as possible.

It was almost enough to make Dean want to shoot himself.

Anyway, after spending a few hours tied to an apple tree and waiting for a fugly fertility god to skin him alive, the situation didn’t seem too bad. At least he knew that he could count on Sam to come after him. All he needed to do was wait. And stay alive.

“So,” Dean said, pulling on the cuff again, “you come here often?”

“All the time,” Jen snapped. “Now stop that.” She continued to shift around behind him, but didn’t move away like he thought she would. In fact, she was still in the exact position she’d been in when he realized she was there in the basement with him. It almost sounded to him like she was struggling with something, something tied down –

Oh shit.

“Uh, Jen?” he asked. “You mind telling me what I’m handcuffed to?”

“Me, you son of a bitch,” she answered. “Now stop yanking on my hand.”

“Sorry about that. You tied up, too?”

“Yeah.” She shifted around again. “I’m working on that part. I hope.”

“The rope?” Dean asked. “If you’re tied up like me, then all I can say is that someone did his homework. It’s got me pretty good.”

“Yeah, well. You work with combative dementia patients, you learn how to get your hands free. Besides, I don’t know if you noticed this, but I have big wrists and small hands. That helps.”

“Ah,” he said. He hadn’t noticed, but he’d been a little distracted the last few times they’d been together. And speaking of distraction, there was still the edimmu to consider. It had to have been possessing someone, and Jen was still his best bet. Even though she didn’t seem to be possessed at the moment. “So, uh. Have any blackouts lately?” He tried for conversational, but it didn’t quite come out that way.

“Just when I was grabbed,” she answered. She paused and grunted, like she was really struggling with that rope. It was hemp, too, not nylon, so he knew that shit had to be digging into her skin. “It was after work,” she managed between grunts. “Just clocked out, was on my way to my car. I had the keys in my hand and everything...”

She trailed off, went still, though her breathing was ragged.

“You okay over there?” Dean asked.

“No.” She continued to breathe like that, loud, shuddering breaths, and he realized that she wasn’t winded. She was about to cry. Shit. Crying women Dean could deal with, but only under certain circumstances. Handcuffed together in a basement, fully clothed? Not one of those circumstances. “Riana’s going to freak out,” she moaned. He voice wavered, but there wasn’t any sobbing. Yet. “I bet she’s out there, looking for my dead body right now.”

“Riana?”

“My girlfriend,” Jen answered with a sniffle. “You know, she’s pretty even keel most of the time, but when something big happens, she falls apart. So she’s out there, thinking I’m dead, and I’m in here, tied to a chair in a room with you.”

Dean frowned. That was a slur against him, he was sure, but there were more important things to focus on. “You’re a lesbian?” he asked. “Is that why you hate me so much?”

“Oh, _please_ ,” she managed, and then seemed to pull herself together. “I’m gay because I only want to sleep with women. I hate you because you’re a pain in my ass.”

“What did I do?”

“Plenty,” she replied, back to sounding like a cold bitch. “You wander around where you don’t belong, you break into a lock-down ward, you flirt like you’re god’s gift to women, and you got Michael all riled up. Plus, you’re obnoxious and smarmy.”

That definitely was a slur against him. “I refuse to believe that ‘smarmy’ is a word,” he protested. Even though he kind of thought it was. But if it was, then it was a stupid word.

“Aren’t you a writer? Look it up in the dictionary. It should be easy to find. Your picture is pasted right next to it.”

“Cute,” Dean told her. “That’s really cute. And here I thought that being in a life-or-death situation would bring us together.”

“We _are_ together,” she said, and then started struggling with the rope again. “That’s the problem.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “this is no picnic for me, either. I mean, you’ve been a Grade-A bitch since the moment you laid eyes on me.”

Then, at least, she seemed a little sorry. “It’s been a rough few weeks for me,” she said, and her voice was low, almost defeated. “I was on vacation for a while, and when I came back, one of my favorite patients had died, and Michael was out of control. I’d never seen him like that before.” Dean assumed she meant his weirdly intense psychic predictions of death. “Then two more patients died. Dmitri, we knew was going to happen, but Harrold was a shock. I walked into his room to get him dressed for the morning, and he was dead.” She went still again, and he could hear the uneven edge to her breathing. Trying not to cry. “And Grace.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

“She was a family friend,” Jen explained. “She and my mom have known each other for ages.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, knowing how lame it sounded. Sam could have talked to her, worked with her pain and comforted her with his sad puppy eyes and Captain Empathy face. “I’ve had a crappy time, too, so I get it.”

She sniffled, but when she spoke, her tone was much brighter. Concentrating on someone else’s pain over her own. Dean knew that tactic well. “If you don’t mind my asking, what happened?”

“I got hit by a car,” he said. “It was headed for Sam, and I pushed him out of the way.” He tried to shrug, but his bindings wouldn’t allow it. “He’s been guilt-ridden over it, not sleeping, and I finally managed to get him calmed down a little, and then this has to go and happen. So, he’s probably freaking out, tearing up the place, looking all broody and emo and dangerous.”

Dean could see Sam in his head, like he was psychic, too, could see the face Sammy wore when he woke up and found Dean missing. Dean didn’t like it when his brother wore that face. It was a hard, cut-off expression, everything vulnerable locked away. He looked like Dad at his most driven.

“The worst part?” Dean continued, shaking the image from his mind. “He’s out there right now, _driving my car_. Hope he remembers to fill her up on premium,” he added under his breath.

Jen laughed, that same short, low laugh that the other nurses and aides used. “Sam’s that really tall guy?” she asked. “He looked pretty emo. No offense, but that hair...”

“He looks like he has wings on the sides of his head,” Dean agreed. “I’ve been trying to get him to cut it since we were kids.” Too late, Dean remembered that the nursing staff didn’t know he and Sam were brothers. But she didn’t take any notice of it, or if she did, she didn’t show that she noticed it. Dean cleared his throat and started into business. That girly touchy-feely crap could wait until Sam was there so Dean could make fun of him.

There was something evil after Jen and him. That took priority any day of the week. Which brought him back to the question of who exactly the edimmu was wearing.

“So, what happened when you got grabbed?”

There was a slight hesitation, and then she started shifting around again. Working the ropes, even though her skin had to be all torn up already. “I don’t remember anything,” she replied. “I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. I clocked out, grabbed my bag, and made my way to the car. Uh,” she added, sounding a little embarrassed, “I also salute the security camera when I leave.”

Security camera? That was a definite plus, though it didn’t mean that the edimmu was caught on camera. Sam and Dean tended towards luck in that corner, but they couldn’t go around expecting it. And even if the entire attack was caught on film, there was also the possibility that, as a spirit, the edimmu threw off EVP. Jen left work in the morning, which meant that she wouldn’t have noticed any flickering lights, and he doubted she would have paid any attention to cold spots. But then again, maybe the edimmu wouldn’t set off the normal signals when it was possessing someone. It was tough to tell, without Sam’s Google-fu or Dad’s journal.

Dean’s head hurt. It was too much to consider all at once. “Okay, did you see anyone when you were leaving?”

“I usually do,” she answered. “I leave right when a lot of the day staff comes on. Like housekeeping, and some of the therapists.” She paused, and goddamn but he wished he could see her face to read it. “Why? You think this is one of them?”

“Yeah, well. If the shoe fits,” Dean mumbled. He was torn between telling Jen the truth and telling her the most convenient lie he could think of. On one hand, most people tended to believe only what was shoved in their faces or spoon-fed to them. Dean didn’t know if Jen was one of those people or not. Circumstantial evidence said not, but he wasn’t counting on that. On the other hand, the fucking edimmu had them in its fucking clutches already.

“Why?” Jen repeated, and her voice had an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. Like she’d figured out that there was something he was holding back.

Dean didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter. The basement door opened, to his left, and whoever it was that the edimmu was wearing started down the stairs. Dean wasn’t in the best of positions to see who it was, not that he was too sure he would recognize the person, anyway. He caught a glimpse of shoes and narrow legs wearing black pants before the edimmu passed beyond his field of vision.

Behind him, Jen inhaled sharply.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Applebaum, Miss Edwards.”

It was Kathie.

***

“Sorry about the accommodations,” Kathie apologized, like she was an embarrassed hostess and not some creature that had the two of them tied down in her basement. “This is just a temporary thing.”

“Kathie,” Jen moaned, voice thick with emotion, “why are you doing this?”

Kathie took a few steps to Dean’s side of the room. She placed herself directly in front of him, so close he could have throttled her had his hands been free. His palms itched for a knife or a gun or a fucking paperclip.

“You didn’t tell her?” Kathie asked, and she almost sounded hurt.

“Tell me what?” Jen asked.

Kathie smiled at him, and when she smiled she didn’t look remotely human. Nothing about her face had changed, or her body. It was just that creepy evil smile. Well, maybe not just the smile. The low lighting helped. “I heard you and your _friend_ last night,” she continued, voice low. “You called me a son of a bitch and everything. That wasn’t nice. It hurt my feelings.”

“I didn’t know that monsters had feelings,” Dean gritted out. He leaned forward as much as he could, straining against the rope. “Did you touch him?” he demanded. Tied down, he didn’t seem like much of a threat, but just let that bitch get close enough and it wouldn’t matter. Broken pelvis or not, if she laid one fucking finger on Sammy, then he was going to make her death a slow and painful one.

Her smiled dropped. “Relax. He’s fine. Although he is,” she sighed, “ _remarkably_ healthy, he’s a little much for my constitution.” She straightened up and started to pace in a circle around them. “You two, on the other hand, are just about perfect. It’s a little soon to be eating again, but I really couldn’t help it. Besides, the both of you were a little too close to figuring things out. You certainly are quite persistent.”

Dean jerked his head as far as he could towards Jen. He couldn’t manage to turn far enough to see her, but he could just barely make out Kathie out of the corner of his eye.

Jen’s breathing was ragged, labored. “I don’t know anything,” she gasped. “I just wanted to know what was going on.”

“You were looking,” Kathie said. “That was more than a lot of people were doing. More than the police, at least.” She breathed out a sigh. “Anyway, I have to go. Thanks to you, this gig is up.” She made for the stairs again, about the same time the muscles in Dean’s neck started to protest him turning his head so far. So he just listened to her footsteps up the stairs. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. “Don’t worry.”

“Great,” Dean muttered. Sam was fine, that was a relief, but on the other hand, they seemed to be working with a time limit.

“What did she mean?”

Dean pulled on the rope that held his hand. “Can we not talk about this now? The bitch is planning on eating us, you know.”

“I gathered that much. I want to know what you know.”

Dean shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him “Trust me, that you don’t want to know. Dammit!” he swore, as the rope bit into his skin. If he couldn’t get free, then he was pretty certain that Jen couldn’t manage it, either. He jerked his handcuffed hand around, and found that it he really strained, he could just barely managed to scrape the keyhole with his thumb. Which would have been awesome if he, you know, had something he could use to pick it. “Dammit,” he said again, a low growl. “I really need to start carrying paperclips.”

“For the handcuffs?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

There was a bit of shifting and rustling behind him, punctuated by a soft hiss. Dean jerked in his seat. Had she managed to get her hand free? Then there was a tug on the chain, pulling his arm at a painful angle. Her fingers – at least he hoped those were her fingers – groped around his hand until she pressed something small into his palm. “Will this do?”

It was a little piece of thin metal, bent almost into a full circle. Right where the circle would have been completed, there was a hinge and a latch. It seemed familiar, but for some reason, he couldn’t place where he might have seen it before. Of course, being able to see what it looked like might have helped. “What’s this?” Dean asked.

“It’s my earring,” she replied, and Dean recognized it as one of the little silver hoops she had been wearing the night before.

“Sorry, but I’m about to ruin it.”

“Hmm,” she said, sarcasm lacing her voice. “Let’s think about this. Lose an earring? Or get eaten?”

Dean shook his head and started to bend the wire into the shape he needed. “Nice to know you have your priorities straight.”

Sam had once timed him on how long it took him to pick a lock. With the lock in front of him, he could manage it in under fifteen seconds. Bound, working blind, and behind his back? It took a little bit longer, but then the handcuff popped open, and Dean’s hand was free. From there, it took a few minutes to untie his other hand, but once that was done, he could untie himself from the chair easily.

And finally, he could turn in his seat to look at Jen. Their chairs had been placed back-to-back, with about a foot separating them. Like Dean, she’d been tied with one hand bound to the back of the chair. Those ropes hung loosely, slowly unraveling, stained with faint red smudges.

Dean unlocked her and then untied the rope the rest of the way. Unlike Dean, she was also bound at her feet, which he learned when she bent to undo it. But then she got to her feet and faced him, clutching the hand that had been tied down around the wrist with her other hand. They weren’t free, not yet, but it was a damned good start.

It was also the first time since that ghost had run him down that something had gone right.

Too bad he still couldn’t walk.

***

It didn’t seem that far from the chairs to the staircase, but it was. In the therapy gym, with Kathie’s help and a set of parallel bars, Dean had managed almost thirty feet. The stairs were less than half of that distance away, but the only support he had was Jen.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. She looked a mess, dressed in her scrubs, her hair down and glasses missing, but her eyes were fierce.

“Let me see your hand,” Dean countered. There was a lot of blood, which wasn’t a good sign. He reached out to her, but she stood still, clutching her wrist.

“You first. Tell me.”

“Give me your hand,” Dean repeated, with a lot more force.

She flinched and stepped forward, holding it out to him. There was a rope burn, a little less than an inch thick, wrapped around the back of her hand, from the edge to the heel. Fortunately, Dean had no particular attachment to the shirt he was wearing. It wasn’t like it was his, it was just a faded scrub shirt. He ripped a long strip off across the bottom hem and used that as a makeshift bandage.

Jen kept her eyes down, focused on her injury and not on Dean. She didn’t make a noise as he wrapped her hand, which earned her a few points in his book. Once he was finished, though, she didn’t move away, just looked at him. “I’m here, too. I deserve to know.”

“Kathie’s possessed,” he explained. “There’s an evil spirit inside of her.”

Jen nodded. “Okay.”

“It’s called an edimmu. It’s created when a body isn’t buried. At first it’s just your garden variety ghost, but then it learns how to drain the life-force out of people when they die. It steals their last breath, and the more it steals, the stronger it gets.” Dean shook his head. “This one is pretty strong.”

Jen nodded again, but she was wearing that freaked out face that civilians often wore when they found out the truth. “Ghosts are real.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re real.”

“And evil spirits.”

“Yeah.”

“Werewolves?”

“Those too.”

“How about vampires?”

“Extinct.”

“Fairies?”

“Yeah.”

“Dragons?”

“Never come across one.”

Jen fell silent. Dean took the opportunity to test getting to his feet. It wasn’t that far to walk, he told himself, and the stairs had a railing he could hold onto. And he really needed to get Jen out of there before Kathie returned. So he took a deep breath, pushed off of the chair with both hands, and stood up.

“Careful!” Jen yelped, and grabbed him in a bear hug. She wasn’t holding him up, he told himself. It just hurt less with her standing there.

“We don’t have time for careful,” Dean returned. “God knows when that bitch is coming back.”

She rearranged her grip on him, ducking under his arm and grabbing him by the back of his pants with her good hand. It wasn’t comfortable in the least, but he was upright, and that was a start. Better was when he managed to convince his feet to start moving, even though every step he took made pain shoot through his pelvis. It made walking a very slow process.

“You okay?” Jen asked.

“What do you think?” Dean demanded, then muttered to himself, “I can’t believe I miss that fucking wheelchair.”

“Because having it would do you so much good right now.” She met his sharp look with an apologetic one. “Sorry. My patients don’t normally react to sarcasm. I’ve kind of gotten bad at it. And by bad, I mean I use it a lot.”

Sweat had beaded up on Dean’s forehead, like he had been running and carrying the entire contents of the Impala’s trunk on his back. But he noted, if only to make himself feel better, that Jen was flushed and sweating, too. “Have I mentioned that you’re a bitch?” he gritted out.

She laughed, and it wasn’t that strange short and low laugh, either. “Now you sound like Riana,” she said. “The two of you would get along. You’re both shameless flirts.”

He set his smile on her, even though she wasn’t looking at him. “So, tell me about her.” It would distract him from the walk and how long it was taking him to get over to the stairs, and how much it was going to fucking suck to try to climb them. “What’s she like?”

“You mean, is she hot?” Jen asked, rolling her eyes. She muttered something under her breath, something that might have been, _shameless horny bisexuals_ , and continued, “Very. I have good taste, you know.”

“How do I know that?” Dean asked. “For all I know, she could be a flannel-wearing dyke with a mullet.”

“Because I’m the one that wears flannel in our relationship, not her.” Jen sighed. “Okay, for comparison, have you ever heard of a website called Busty Asian Beauties dot com?”

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. “You like BAB dot com?” he demanded. “That’s my favorite site. The platinum membership? Worth every penny.”

Jen laughed again. “My god, I have something in common with you. Anyway, you know the model on the cover of the calendar? I think she goes by the name ‘June’. Riana looks like her, only Japanese.”

Awesome. Dean approved. “You do have good taste,” he admitted. By that time, they’d made it over to the stairs. Jen lowered him down to the steps, and then ran up to check the basement door. Dean was too busy trying to breathe through the pain to watch, but he could hear the rattle of the bolt in the door.

“Locked,” she said. She came back down the stairs, sat up a few steps up from him. “Can you pick it?”

Dean held up the slightly mangled remains of her earring. “Not with one of these,” he replied.

She breathed out and got to her feet again. “Well, we can’t just sit here and wait for Kathie to come eat us,” she muttered. “Stay put.” Dean frowned at that. He was the experienced hunter, she was the freaked out civilian. If he wasn’t hurting so much, he would have lodged a protest. But she was back in the depths of the basement, looking over those shelves, rooting through the dusty boxes.

“Something long and thin,” he told her. “Notched on one end, if you can manage it.”

“Find the lights,” she returned.

Dean got to his feet, looking around a little shakily, and scanned the wall for a light switch. There was one, fortunately not that far up the steps – Jen wasn’t watching, so he scooted up the stairs on his ass – but when he flipped it, nothing happened. “I don’t think we have any power. Besides, I thought you had good night vision.”

“I do,” he heard her mutter, “but it’s not night right now, and my glasses are missing. A- _ha_!”

Good news. More good news. They could identify the edimmu, they were free of their bindings, and Jen had found something to pick the lock. Things just kept on getting brighter and brighter.

Well, except that Jen didn’t have anything that could be used to pick a lock. What she had was a blunt chisel. He looked from it to the door, trying to figure out how long it would take to chop through it when he noticed something very important. The way the door swung open was to their side. A major design flaw, on one hand, but a big point in their favor. The hinges were right there.

“Awesome,” Dean breathed. Jen helped him up the rest of the stairs, and together they made quick work of it, prying the axis pin out with the chisel and then hacking away at the lock until they could just shove the door out of the frame. Climbing over the door wasn’t so much fun at all, and took a lot longer than Dean would have liked, but then they were free again.

The rest of the house wasn’t quite like Dean had imagined. Oh, the tasteful upholstery and flocked wallpaper was there, but it was all covered in a layer of grime. The front sitting room must have looked incredible before the edimmu arrived. It must have had its little claws into Kathie a whole lot longer than two weeks, if he was to judge by the lack of cleanliness alone. He brushed off a chair for a moment before settling down on it. Fire was burning across his belly, and the sweat was still pouring down his face. 

“You okay?” Jen asked.

“I’ll be a lot better once we get out of here,” he answered. He tried to catch his breath, but it wasn’t coming, and he felt pale and shaky. Dammit, it was like after the rawhead, when his heart was on the fritz, only he hurt a hell of a lot more. At least Sam wasn’t there to hover over him, although it would have been nice to know that he had Dean’s back. He reached out for Jen, and she helped him to his feet without saying anything. Not hovering, but definitely concerned.

Dammit. He must look like utter shit, then.

“Let’s go,” he started to say, but stopped when he heard an engine roar into the driveway. It wasn’t his baby, no. It was something else, and Jen set him back down to go over to the curtains and peer through them.

“U-Haul,” she said, and faced Dean to singsong, “She’s heee-eeere.”

***

“Get down,” Dean hissed.

Jen dropped to the floor with no hesitation. God only knew what that shit was that was everywhere. She made a disgusted face – which he didn’t blame her for, she was flattened against the matted carpet and that puke-inducing crap – and slithered back to where he was seated. “I don’t think Kathie saw me,” she whispered, and got to her feet. The crap on the floor had rubbed off on her shirt, and she brushed at it, almost idly, until she realized what she was doing. 

Dean shook his head. It didn’t matter what the stuff was. There was a bit of a trail left on the floor, a slightly cleaner track where Jen had been. But the edimmu wearing Kathie didn’t seem concerned with her housekeeping skills, so he hoped that it wouldn’t be noticed for a while.

“Help me to the floor,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Getting you back up is going to be hard enough, but—”

“Help me to the floor,” he repeated, cutting her off. He knew what his mobility was like, but he also knew that just sitting on a chair in the middle of a monster’s living room, no matter how comfortable, was an extremely stupid thing to try. And from the floor, hidden behind some furniture, Dean would have the added plus of stealth and, he hoped, the element of surprise.

“Okay,” she said, “but any discomfort you feel is your own problem.” She grabbed him under the arms and pulled him to his feet. Pain lanced through him, more than before, but he tried not to let it show. Which wasn’t easy and didn’t get any easier when she walked him to the sofa. There was a gap between it and the wall, and he gestured to it. There was no way he was going to trust his voice, not when he hurt that much.

“You should go,” he whispered, once he was in place. The floor was a lot less comfortable than the chair had been, but Kathie was only a moment from returning, and from there things were going to get tricky. “Leave through the back, try to find Sam. Hurry!”

Jen gave him a look people normally reserved for rabid dogs and the certifiably insane. “No way. This thing feeds on our last breath, right? We just need to not die.”

Which sounded simple, but was actually a lot more complicated than that. “While it’s a spirit,” Dean corrected her. “Once it possesses someone, it can drain your living fluids until you’re dead.” Which he would have said earlier, but she had decided to play ‘guess which beasties are real’ instead.

“And you didn’t mention this before, why?”

They really didn’t have time for that argument, so Dean tried to derail her. “That mean you’ll run for help?”

“Fuck, no!”

Dean wanted to argue further, really he did, but that was when Kathie came in the front door, humming a cheerful tune to herself. Dean pulled Jen down next to him, and she scooted as far behind him as she could manage, shielded from view by the sofa. There wasn’t room for the two of them, and as soon as Kathie looked over, the game was going to be up, and Dean would have to move on to his next job – kicking ass.

He needed a plan, and he needed one fast.

All Dean had on hand was himself, Jen, and an ugly sofa giving him cover. He’d been in worse situations, but he usually had Sam at his back. Jen could manage a decent bitch face, but she wasn’t Sam. She wasn’t armed, and he was willing to bet she wouldn’t know what to do with something if she was.

Jen tapped him on the leg with something, and when he looked to see what it was, he could have kissed her. She had the chisel in her hand. It was solid and heavy and, judging by the rust, made of iron. One thing about that chick, she was resourceful.

Kathie’s humming came closer, and Dean knew then that he only had one shot. Once he attacked, that was it. He guessed that she had noticed something – the trail on the carpet, curtains moving, his strained breathing, whatever – and was closing in for the kill. He waited long seconds listening to the humming, which had gone tuneless and was getting louder. It was when he could see the cuff of her pants that he knew she was close enough.

Dean rammed the chisel into Kathie’s shin. She should have gone down, her leg broken, bleeding out all over the place. But she didn’t. Instead, she sighed and shook her head, like she was about to scold a puppy.

“Really,” she said, and reached down to pick him up by the neck. Dean clutched at her hands, desperate to keep his airway open. “I was going to make this painless for you, I really was.” He heard some sort of scrabbling from behind him, and Kathie’s voice went cold. “Move and I’ll snap his neck like a twig.”

Black spots appeared in his vision, and a vague gray haze settled over everything. Desperate, Dean did the only thing he could think of. He punched her in the face. It was a weak shot, really, but to his great surprise she dropped him and stumbled back. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, Jen’s arms wrapped around him.

“You idiot!” she said. “Just what were you thinking?”

Kathie was on the floor, too, and she looked about as good as he did. It didn’t make any sense, he thought until he looked at his hand and remembered. “My ring,” he said. Jen looked confused, so he added, “It’s silver, that’s why it worked. Iron dispels spirits, but this bitch isn’t a spirit anymore. And silver can kill impure things.”

And for good measure, he punched Kathie a few more times, making sure to connect with the ring. She wasn’t moving, hell, she wasn’t even _breathing_ , but that just confirmed something else that Dean had assumed. The edimmu had been wearing Kathie for too long. Maybe it had gotten comfortable in there or something, and that was why it was keeping Kathie’s body alive. But Kathie herself, he guessed, was long dead. Had probably been dead for as long as the house had been a mess.

“So, is it over?” Jen asked.

Probably not, but that wasn’t what she needed to hear. “Sam can come and finish it up,” he said. He reached for her hand, and she grabbed onto him to pull him to his feet again. Which hurt more than being electrocuted. “C’mon, let’s get the hell out of here.”

And that was when Sam broke down the front door, shotgun aimed directly at them.

***

“Dean, get down!” Sam yelled, and instinct kicked in. Dean ducked, pulling Jen down with him. The floor came up to meet him, and pain blazed through him like fire. The shotgun went off, over his head, but it sounded far away, and he thought he heard a body hit the floor behind him.

“Oh my god,” Jen panted.

Dean looked over at Sam, who lowered the shotgun. His face was tight and lined, all the good from that little bit of sleep they’d gotten worn away. Of course, Dean wasn’t looking so hot himself. One look at Sam told him how bad it was, but there were more important things to worry about.

“Silver-tipped shells?” Dean asked.

Sam nodded, and Dean tried to turn to look behind him. Kathie was splayed out across that gross carpet, eyes open and blank. Half of her cheek was missing, bone and blood spattered out across the furniture and wall. There was a part of him that wanted to feel bad about it, because she had been a person. She just got a raw deal. The other part of him knew that the person he had known and had helped him through his therapy had never really existed. It was all the edimmu, playing with him. 

“Bitch,” he pronounced.

Together, Sam and Jen got him to his feet, which was a good thing because his legs were no longer listening to him. Once he had his feet under him, he tried to make for the door, but stopped when Sam did. Sam turned, grabbed the sides of his face with those giant fucking hands, and pressed his forehead against Dean’s.

“Friggin’ girl,” Dean said to him.

Sam made a noise in his throat, the kind of choking sound that was either a laugh or a sob, but didn’t let go. “I’m sorry, Dean,” he whispered. “I was supposed to have your back. I’m sorry.”

“Next time,” Dean said back, “I’ll read the Latin, and you can do the stupid macho stuff.” Sam laughed for real, then, low and weak and relieved. Dean shoved his brother away, but gently. He was like one of those face-hugger aliens or something. Sam didn't seem to mind, though, and just smiled at him.

“Let’s go,” Jen said, shifting the bulk of Dean’s weight back and forth. “Nice reunion, very touching, but I have a girlfriend out there who’s patrolling the streets for my corpse. I should get back to her before someone calls the cops. Again.”

Sam ducked low, under Dean’s arm, and hauled him up again. There was some tension in his shoulders, but it was a different kind of tension than before. “Yeah, look. About your girlfriend...” Jen leaned forward, tilting Dean to one side to peer around him at Sam.

“What did you do?” Dean asked.

Sam shrugged, which made Dean wince. Being bounced around between a monster and the floor, twice, after pushing himself further than he’d managed since the car hit him in the first place? Yeah, that sucked. Fortunately, Sam seemed to notice and held him pretty steady after that. “She hired me to help find the two of you. That’s how I managed to find this place. I cross-referenced between the death dates of the patients and the staff scheduled for those days, managed to narrow it down to three.”

“So, how did you figure out it was Kathie?” Jen asked.

Sam exhaled a short puff of breath. “I was going through them alphabetically. Kathie Abelson was first and I, uh, I saw the U-Haul in the driveway. She was listed as being single with no dependants, so I broke the door down.”

Dean was about to point out how reckless it was to go around kicking in doors without more research than that, but at that point, they made it to the broken door in question. Freedom was just a few steps away, and through the open doorway Dean could even see the sleek shine of his baby.

But before they could cross the threshold and exit the damned place, the door picked itself up off the floor and slammed back into the frame.

Sam jerked them around, pivoting to face where Kathie’s corpse had fallen. “Fuck,” Dean gritted out. The blood spatters were still fresh and wet, but her corpse was black, shriveled. Mummified, like Grace had been. Dean was willing to bet that the edimmu had jumped ship, draining any remains of vital fluids with it as it left.

“I’m guessing that’s not good,” Jen noted, right before something invisible knocked her aside.

Dean leaned back against the splintered door, hoping to keep himself upright. Sam released him, carefully, and handed over the shotgun and two silver-tipped shells. Dean had it loaded in a heartbeat. The problem was, there was nothing that he could see to aim for. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he wiped it away with one shaky hand.

“Jen,” he hissed. “You okay?”

There was no response at first, and then she let out a low groan. Dean hazarded a look over to the side, to see how she was doing. She was crumpled on the floor, bleeding steadily from a cut above one eye.

“Define okay,” she answered.

“You’re breathing, right? That’s good enough for now,” Dean assured her.

Sam stepped in front of him, just far enough forward that Dean could still see to aim. He had his knife in his hand, the nasty curved one, and his shoulders hunched slightly with the tension in the air. Dean would have like to be the one in front, protecting Sam from the monster, but then he remembered what Kathie had said. Sam was “too much” for her, which meant that he was likely safer than Dean himself or Jen.

Something cold and solid connected with his side, and then everything went black. He heard Sammy’s voice in the distance, calling his name, and managed to open his eyes to look around. He was slumped against the door and Sam was hovering over him, his big eyes wide with panic. More importantly, though, Dean saw it.

Sam watched his face, read it correctly, grabbed the shotgun and turned to smash the butt into the edimmu’s face in one motion. That knocked it back for a bit, long enough for Dean to collect himself and register exactly what he was seeing.

The edimmu was corporeal, not a spirit, and it didn’t look like it was possessing anyone. It stood maybe five feet tall, but was hunched over, bent nearly in half at the waist. It was naked and very thin, emaciated with a sunken chest and abnormally skeletal arms and hands. A gross matted mess of hair fell over its face, a face that looked like it could have been human at some point. Its eyes were the only part of it that truly looked alive, and even then they were bloodshot and raw.

“I’m very hungry now,” it rasped, and the voice it used sounded something like wind blowing through branches, or dead leaves rustling over gravel. The edimmu reached out toward Dean, but Sam smashed the shotgun into its face again. The thing rocked back again, then straightened up with a creaking sound, and grabbed onto Sam.

Naturally, it grabbed him by the throat. Everything went for his throat first. Sam dropped the shotgun and clutched at its hands, already wheezing.

“Sammy!” Dean yelled – shit, even that hurt now – and reached for the shotgun. He didn’t have a clean shot, not by a mile, not with Sam being his giant self and the edimmu looking like a mummy and his own hands white and shaking. But the thing was choking Sam. He didn’t know where to aim, but a low enough shot wouldn’t kill his brother. So Dean fired anyway.

The first shot missed them both, which really sucked, but the second one winged Sam on the thigh and hit the edimmu in the belly. It dropped Sam, who fell to the floor and started coughing.

Dean leaned back against the door for support, dizzy and panting. The edge of his vision was gray again, and that was another bad sign, but Dean didn’t have time to deal with that. The edimmu was still moving, clutching at its belly with one boney hand. It stepped over Sam, who reached out after it, like that was going to stop the son of a bitch.

“I had plans for you,” it said to Dean, leaning close enough that he was bathed in the foul sickly-sweet smell of its breath. “I was going to make you healthy again. She was supposed to help me with your therapy. You and that bitch,” Dean assumed it meant Jen, “were going to be so delicious.” It shrugged with its free arm, a gesture that looked disturbingly human. “I even thought of keeping you alive, you know. Breed the two of you. Have my own farm of human tidbits.”

It grabbed his shoulder, hauled him up from the floor, fingers digging in through the thin scrub shirt. That close, Dean could hear its joints creaking like rope pulled to its utter limit. That close, Dean could see the empty cavern that was its open mouth, and he kind of wondered if the edimmu would do him the favor of eating him face first, so he wouldn’t have to look at it any more.

That close, Dean could feel the impact.

“Problem with your breeding program,” Jen’s voice hissed from somewhere behind the edimmu. “I’m gay.”

It dropped him and Dean hit the floor for the fourth time that day. Everything went dark for an instant, and when Dean’s vision started to clear, it took a lot longer than it should have to figure out what was going on.

The edimmu had a fork sticking out of its shoulder. Dean blinked a few times, trying to process what he was seeing. It wasn’t exactly easy. The fork in particular looked like a salad fork, the kind used for serving, and the black tarnish on the tines and handle said silver. The edimmu was writhing on the floor, rolling back and forth, obviously hurt. Jen stood over it, blood covering almost one entire side of her face.

“Dean?” Sam wheezed. He was crouched next to Dean, blood on his hands that Dean didn’t remember. He wondered how Sam had managed to injure himself when the edimmu didn’t look like it was capable of doing much – thank you, Jen – but then he realized that it was coming from himself, his shoulder, and remembered that the edimmu had grabbed him there.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean swore. He couldn’t see the injury, but he knew it was there, and once he knew that it was there, it hurt. He looked up at Sam, whose eyes were very dark and dangerous. “I’ll be fine, Sammy.”

Sam nodded and stood up. “Jen, go to the kitchen. See if you can find something flammable. Like cooking oil or something.”

Jen didn’t answer, just turned away and vanished down the hall.

Sam grabbed the fork lodged in the edimmu’s shoulder and yanked it out. It made a sort of screaming noise, a weak one. “Should have killed you when I had the chance,” it panted at him.

“Yeah, well, you should have kept your fucking hands off my brother,” Sam returned, his voice soft and deadly, and then he brought the fork down on the base of the evil bitch’s neck. The edimmu collapsed to the floor and stopped moving. There were a few minutes of silence, Sam and Dean staring at the shriveled thing. Dad’s journal had never mentioned edimmu becoming corporeal, but the journal was also pretty freaking cryptic.

“You think we should leave him a message?” Dean asked.

Sam didn’t ask who he was talking about. He just shook his head, and then Jen was back with a very dusty bottle of cooking brandy, and the time for talking was over. They doused the body, then Jen shoved the front door out of the doorframe again and helped Dean down the front steps to a safe distance. Sam remained in the doorway, fumbling with a lighter. Dean turned to look at him, and found Sam’s eyes fixed on him. Then Sam started and looked away, his expression almost guilty, and lit the bitch up.

They three of them stood there and watched for a while. The glow of the fire was satisfying, and knowing that the son of a bitch was good and dead made Dean feel a lot better. He guessed that it made Sam and Jen feel better, too.

“So,” Jen said, sounding exactly like he felt, “it’s over?”

Dean looked over at Jen. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”

 

Epilogue:

 

“Dude, if you don’t stop hovering, I’m going to beat you with my crutches.”

Sam huffed and backed off a few inches, but he didn’t stop with the hovering. Dean shook his head and decided that that was good enough for now. It had been a crappy month of absolute epic proportions for the two of them, but it was finally over.

“Do you really think you’re ready?” Sam asked for the zillionth time.

“Yes, I’m goddamned ready. And no, I’m not staying an extra few days to make sure. I finished PT. The doctor said everything looks good. My incisions are healed. The paperwork is signed. It’s over. We’re leaving _now_.” Okay, so looming protective Sammy was cute for a while, but after another week in the hospital and an additional two weeks at the nursing home, it had gotten old. Like, really old. It was almost enough to make one consider the benefits of fratricide. 

Dean was ready to be gone, ready to slide behind the wheel of his car and just drive for hours, his music turned up all the way. Sam couldn’t even complain about that anymore. He’d bought himself one of those iPods, and between the two of them they’d determined that it had about five solid hours of battery life, and that Sam’s taste in music was utter shit.

Well, Dean had figured it out. Sam was still in denial.

Dean was saved by Alexander coming into his room. After being kidnapped by one of the nursing home employees, Sam had made a little bit of noise about a lawyer – all of which was bullshit – and Dean had landed a private room with an extra bed, all at no additional charge. Alexander didn’t look surprised at the hovering Sam, but Dean figured most of the staff was pretty used to him by now. He’d all but made his staying by Dean’s side constantly one of the conditions of their settlement.

“Take this thing away from me,” Dean demanded, jerking his thumb at Sam.

Alexander shook his head. “Sorry, man, but it’s discharge day. He’s entirely your problem now.”

Sam pouted behind him. Dean didn’t have to look to see his expression, he just knew that Sam was being a pouty bitch.

“Jerk,” Sam muttered.

That didn’t even need a “bitch,” but it hung there in the air anyway, unspoken. Besides, under it all Sam knew he was being obnoxious. Hell, Dean even understood it a bit. Were their positions reversed, he knew he would have been the one scaring away nice nurses and not making friends with the aides.

“You’re really going?” Alexander asked.

“Yeah,” Sam and Dean said in unison. Dean shot a look over at Sam, and he scowled and finished shoving Dean’s clothes into the duffel bag.

“Are you going to miss me?” Dean asked.

Alexander laughed. “Hell, no.” He leaned forward, wary of Sam and his death glare of doom, and then slapped Dean lightly on the shoulder. It still hurt a little, even though the stitches were gone, but it was a faint hurt, easily ignored. “Do us all here a big favor,” Alexander continued, his voice a low rumble. “Don’t come back.”

As if a lot of the other staff hadn’t managed to extract that promise out of him already. Even Nurse Cara said that she would stop calling him numb-nuts if he took Sam far away from them. “That’s not a problem, dude,” Dean promised. He looked over at Sam, who had tossed the duffel over his shoulder. “I guess this is it.”

He hopped up on his crutches and hobbled out of the building. He didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate at all. The Winchester brothers weren’t meant to stay in one place for very long. Even if Sam didn’t understand that, Dean did. It was a relief to leave the place he’d been chained to for over a month.

Jen was standing next to the Impala, wearing what she charmingly referred to as her civvies: blue sneakers, jeans, faded t-shirt, and a plaid flannel shirt. The cut over her eye had faded to a little pink line, and he noted that she had even gotten new glasses.

“Hey,” she said by way of greeting. “I see you got busted out of the joint.”

Dean shrugged. “Walls weren’t ever meant to hold me, you see. What’re you doing here? You’re not going to see us off, are you?”

Jen shook her head, and then looked over his shoulder. Sam was approaching with the final discharge papers in hand, proof that he was done with the nursing home. “I need a favor.”

Her face was serious, but Dean couldn’t help but tease, “You mean like fixing your car? Because if it were up to me, I would push that beat-up station wagon of yours off a cliff and buy a real car.”

“I know you know what I mean,” she said, but she smiled anyway.

Sam came up behind Dean, then, and Dean felt his shoulders relax. “What’s up?” Sam asked.

Dean turned to face his brother. “We got work to do.” 

_Fin._


End file.
